[Tutor] How to Compare rpm version using Python Script

[David]

On Sat, 30 Nov 2019 at 12:01, Alan Gauld via Tutor <tutor at python.org> wrote:

> I used to work beside a data processing team who spent their lives
> creating reports from old COBOL based systems. They used to write
> their processed (ie pre-report) data extracts into CSV format files
> but instead of commas they used the cedilla character(ç), as it
> was hardly ever found in real world data (at least not in our area,
> maybe in Romance based language areas that might not hold good).
> But the point was to use a character that you will not actually
> find in the text as a separator.

Years ago I noticed that ASCII contains several control characters that
are specifically intended as data separators:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character#Data_structuring

I sometimes use them in my shell scripting where appropriate, due to
the limited data structures available there, but I've never seen them used
or advocated anywhere else.

Are there reasons why they are not used more widely by programmers
to solve simple textual data separation problems?

I assume that they would still work with utf8, although I've not tested
that.