Delimiters

A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters used to specify the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text or other data streams. An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values. Another example of a delimiter is the time gap used to separate letters and words in the transmission of Morse code.

Delimiters represent one of various means to specify boundaries in a data stream. Declarative notation, for example, is an alternate method that uses a length field at the start of a data stream to specify the number of characters that the data stream contains.

Delimiters can be broken down into:

Field delimiters separate data fields. Record delimiters separate groups of fields.

For example, the CSV file format uses a comma as the delimiter between fields, and an end-of-line indicator as the delimiter between records. For instance:

specifies a simple flat file database table using the CSV file format.

Bracket delimiters (also called block delimiters, region delimiters or balanced delimiters) mark both the start and end of a region of text.

Common examples of bracket delimiters include:

Computing platforms historically use certain delimiters by convention. The following tables depict just a few examples for comparison.

Programming languages (See also, Comparison of programming languages (syntax)).

Field and Record delimiters (See also, ASCII, Control character).

Delimiter collision is a problem that occurs when an author or programmer introduces delimiters into text without actually intending them to be interpreted as boundaries between separate regions. In the case of XML, for example, this can occur whenever an author attempts to specify an angle bracket character. In most file types there is both a field delimiter and a record delimiter, both of which are subject to collision. In the case of comma-separated values files, for example, field collision can occur whenever an author attempts to include a comma as part of a field value (e.g., salary = "$30,000"), and record delimiter collision would occur whenever a field contained multiple lines. Both record and field delimiter collision occur frequently in text files.

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