splitting tables

[robsom]

Il Sat, 07 Feb 2004 22:10:17 +0100, Karl Pflästerer ha scritto:

> What do you want to be done?  To see if an item is missing is trivial:
> just check the length of the splitted line (a list).  But what the right
> action in that case is belongs to you; should the user be asked? is
> always the same column missing? is it possible to distinguish the
> entries without errors from each other so the programm can decide which
> column is missing?

Ok, I'll try to give some more detail. These are files with data from
field measurements and contain information about location, time,
measurement, measurement flag, error, detection limit, calibration and
other stuff like that. The problem is that they are made by different
groups and are not always consistent in their format and I'm trying to
write a code which is as general as possible.
When a table has fixed-width columns and each element is correctly aligned
as in the example I showed you, the problem is solved by slicing the
string as Skip Montanaro suggested in his answer (thanks!), but this is
not always the case. For example I can have something like this:

47.455677 456.67
47.4558 453.8
47.46789 -9999
47.4567 456

where -9999 (or somethinbg similar) indicates there is a blank, one space
divides the columns and the elements can have a different number of
digits. This is of course a worst-case scenario :)
That is why I used split in the beginning, but then I fall into the other
problem, when there is a missing value.
Any suggestions will be much appreciated, thanks

R