It’s not a waste of time… it’s a waste of space. But it does allow you to “enforce” some schema. Which, very few people use that way and so, as a data store using JSON works better.
Or… we could go back to old school records where you store structs with certain defined lengths in a file.
You know what? XML isn’t looking so bad now.
If you want to break the AI ask instead what regex you should use to parse HTML.
We slowly need to interface with an app at work that uses fixed-width too. It does not sound that bad if you hear it but it sucks to figure out where you are missing whitespace when most fields are not used and therefore all whitespace. Oh, and of course there are a lot of fields, also are aligned/formatted differently based on their type and has thin/no/wrong documentation. And I have yet to find a simple but decent “debugger”.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
It’s not a waste of time… it’s a waste of space. But it does allow you to “enforce” some schema. Which, very few people use that way and so, as a data store using JSON works better.
Or… we could go back to old school records where you store structs with certain defined lengths in a file.
You know what? XML isn’t looking so bad now.
If you want to break the AI ask instead what regex you should use to parse HTML.
Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.
Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.
…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.
Oof. That sounds horrible
We slowly need to interface with an app at work that uses fixed-width too. It does not sound that bad if you hear it but it sucks to figure out where you are missing whitespace when most fields are not used and therefore all whitespace. Oh, and of course there are a lot of fields, also are aligned/formatted differently based on their type and has thin/no/wrong documentation. And I have yet to find a simple but decent “debugger”.