Working with fixed format text db's

[John Machin]

On Jun 9, 5:48 am, Mark Carter <m... at privacy.net> wrote:
> Neil Cerutti wrote:
> > The underlying problem, of course, is the archaic flat-file
> > format with fixed-width data fields. Even the Department of
> > Education has moved on to XML for most of it's data files,
>
> :(
>
> I'm writing a small app, and was wondering the best way to store data.
> Currently the fields are separated by spaces. I was toying with the idea
> of using sqlite, yaml or json, but I think I've settled on CSV. Dull,
> but it's easy to parse for humans and computers.

Yup, humans find that parsing stuff like the following is quite easy:

"Jack ""The Ripper"" Jones","""Eltsac Ruo"", 123 Smith St",,Paris TX
12345

Cheers,
John