gemini06720 wrote:Kevin, thank you very much for your suggestions - I have been using the ' | ' (space,bar,space) as a delimiter/separator - do you foresee any problems finding that delimiter within any data element?
Or, maybe I should use your suggested ':::' delimiter...
We are kind of talking about different things here.
Cumulus Stand Point
These should be simple. I don't think the format should change, but the format should be documented so that a remote program knows what format they are in.
I have never seen an example log file that has comma decimal formatted info in it, so I'm not really sure what they look like. I would assume (and could be wrong) that the delimiter is something other than a comma then???
I would expect anything that uses these types of logs to adjust based on what the data is rather than Cumulus.
One of the advantages of using a standard raw format regardless of what the user chooses makes this easier to deal with, but that is a Cumulus 2 thing.
Creating new files on web server
In this case, I have always used a non-standard ::: delimiter since the use of a vertical bar in the past has been problematic. Been using the ::: delimiter in server sided generated data files for 20 year. These files are NOT intended to be used in a spreadsheet though.
For something like the daylog files... I would use this over SQL anyday since there simply isn't enough data to need SQL unless you plan on doing a bunch of unique queries. The flat file is fast enought to load any any report generated could be static and generated once a day since that is how often the data changes (or is added to).
Then the data could be used anywhere php is allowed and even if SQL is not.