Re: Reading from an empty file

[Francisco Olarte <folarte@...>]

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 4:36 PM, Javier Guerra Giraldez
<javier@guerrag.com> wrote:
> On 5 September 2017 at 15:18, Francisco Olarte <folarte@peoplecall.com> wrote:
>> Normally, when you want to be able to have  an empty string, you use
>> line separators, or other similar format for your datafiles, so i.e.,
>> "\n" is a file with just an empty string but "" is a file with no
>> strings on it.
>
> i think what you're describing is "line terminators":
> "" => no lines
> "\n" => one (empty) line
>
> as i understand it, "line separators" would be:
> "" => one (empty) line
> "\n" => two (empty) lines

Yep, terminators, separators have exactly that problem ( I use tab
separated fields, newline terminated record, backslash escaped
contents as data format in many of my programs and I've had to define
a special "no fields" marker precisely for this, distinguishing no
fields from single empty field, no problem with records )

FOS