(brain dead) How do you call text files with data stored with fixed width/length ?

[Mircea Neacsu]

File with fixed field records. They date back to at least FORTRAN where read (and write) statements had a “FORMAT” statement describing the “fields”. The easiest ones to write where those with fixed fields.

Mircea

[Jeremy Falcon]

^(.{1,10})(.*) Tada! That pattern has two capturing groups, with the first going to only 10 chars wide but while allowing spaces. Any regex engine will be able to get the matches. If you be in JavaScript then this is how you get the matches:

const matches = /cool pattern/.exec(line input);
if (matches) {
// can access matches via index, you can trim any extra whitespace
}

Jeremy Falcon

[BernardIE5317]

C++ Standard Template Library makes it easy plus a few pesky details even w/o help from an AI agent.

#include
#include
using namespace std;

int main()
{
int lineBreakLength = 2;
int nameFieldLength = 11;
int ageFieldLength = 3;
basic_ifstream _ifstream(L"text file.txt", ios_base::binary);
char name[16]; name[nameFieldLength] = 0;
char age[8]; age[ageFieldLength] = 0;
char line_break[2];
while(!_ifstream.eof())
{
_ifstream.read(name, nameFieldLength);
_ifstream.read(age, ageFieldLength);
cout << name << ' ' << age << endl;
if(!_ifstream.eof()) _ifstream.read(line_break, lineBreakLength);
}
return 0;
}

"I must have had lessons." - Reverend Jim Ignatowski / Christopher Lloyd

[k5054]

Except for the part where identifiers starting with _ are reserved for the implementation :(

"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants" Chuckles the clown

[Marc Clifton]

Oh look, I'm using an archaic fixed length COBOL-style file format! How's that for the name? ;)

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[Amarnath S]

Maximilien wrote:

Max 13

Does that indicate your age? :-)

[CPallini]

:rolleyes:

"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto

[Jeremy Falcon]

I read it wrong at first too. But, he was asking what to call the file not how to read it. :laugh:

Jeremy Falcon

[Jeremy Falcon]

How about we create a modern acronym for it.... FUBAR! Fixed-length Unicode Byte Array Record :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Jeremy Falcon

[Maximilien]

I'm sure they are direct descendant of punch cards. (large public sector system)

CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair

[Maximilien]

thanks.

CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair

[Gary Wheeler]

FWIW, we've used leading underscores to mark private members as part of our coding conventions since the 1990's and never had an issue.

Software Zen: delete this;

[k5054]

Fortunately, most implementations use a double underscore for system identifiers, so you're usually OK. But if you get strange error messages that refer to an identifier starting with an underscore, you've probably managed to collide with the compilers internals.

"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants" Chuckles the clown

[Alister Morton]

k5054 wrote:

you've probably managed to collide with the compilers internals

I was tearing my hair out once when I couldn't get a bit of financial code to compile - I had a variable called yield. Turns out there was a yield macro in the windows header to maintain compatibility with 16 bit windows. Sheesh.