undefined | Better HN

0 pointscrq-yml2y ago0 comments

There are characters from ASCII for delimiting records, which are underused because they cause confusion about whether they should be represented as a state change like a backspace character, or as a glyph. See also: "nobody can agree on the line ending character sequence".

The USV proposal uses additional codepoints introduced in Unicode for the representation of the record delimiters, so they will always look and edit like character glyphs, and nobody is using them for some other purpose. The standardized look of these glyphs is unappealing, and they aren't easy to type, but it's fixable with a font and some editing functions.

Most of the issue hinges on Excel support.

0 comments

samatman2y ago

> nobody is using them for some other purpose.

There's a lot of tooling which uses them for their intended purpose, which is to represent the C0 control characters in a font, so they can be printed when they appear in a document. Your editor is probably one of those.

Which is why I consider USV a terrible idea. If I see ␇ in a file, I don't want to be constantly wondering if it's "mention ␇" or "use ␇ to represent \x07". That's why the control pictures block exists: to provide pictographs of invisible control characters. Not to make a cutesy hack "look! it's a picture of a control character pretending to be what it isn't!!" format.

ykonstant2y ago

I agree about USV, it creates confusion where none needs to exist. For personal use, though, it is not that bad to receive a USV: it should be postmarked ".usv" and in any case if you suspect shenanigans you can `grep` for the offending (literally!) unicode characters and `tr` them into proper ASCII separators. Now, if there is nesting in the USV, I give up.

I share the lament: the whole table issue was solved before it became a problem. POSIX divides ASCII into portable and non-portable characters; only portable characters are allowed in the fields and separators are non-portable. If you need nesting, use a portable encoding of the inner table. This scheme repeats indefinitely without escaping hell or exceptions, preventing tons of errors and headache.

Visibility is such a bizarre complaint. Text editors already handle control characters: they handle tabs, they handle newlines, it is not a tremendous, earth-shattering feature request to make them handle separators gracefully.

rightbyte2y ago

I don't underatand why this is a question up for debate. You need eye tracking, so that there is a beep when you read the relevant part.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse