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A comment on TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files. Parent comment

Re:TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data... by jstimpfle on Sunday September 01, 2019 @06:12AM (#20851468)
How do you do (for example) column names or types with ASCII only?

How do you extend ASCII?

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Re:TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data... by kps on Sunday September 01, 2019 @04:38PM (#20854747)
ESC is the ASCII character for code extension.

ISO 2022 aka ECMA-35¹ standardizes how to use it in general, but the only thing that really caught on is a subset of the terminal control extensions (ISO 6429 aka ECMA-48² aka ‘ANSI’). In the hypothetical alternate universe where people use ASCII-based structured data, ISO 2022 would have standard sequences for such metadata.

If you were rolling your own today, you'd probably wrap the metadata in Application Program Command (ESC _ … ESC \) or Start Of String (ESC X … ESC \) or one of the private-use sequences. ¹ https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

² https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

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