Re: Legal field names in tab-delimited ASCII DB files?

[Frank Miedreich <miedreich@acm.org>]

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>Greetings-
>
>I have beaten my catalog a bit more into shape, and added some fileds to
>be displayed on my browse pages. I have found that if the field name
>contains a space, the content of the field does not display on the page.
>The docs do not mention that field names may not contain spaces as far as
>I can tell. Are there field name rules I should know about before I
>restructure my database again?
>
>Thanks,
>Pat
>

In certain circumstances you may need field names in URLs, and possibly in
perl.

Thus it is best to avoid any characters that might have a special meaning
for either HTML or perl. I strongly recommend using lower case alphanumeric
exclusively, i.e. [a-z0-9]. This may not be absolutely necessary, but will
make your design more portable.

To quote the part of the documentation you did not find:

Field names can contain the characters A-Za-z0-9, along with hyphen (-),
underscore (_), pound sign/hash mark (#), slash (/), and period (.).


Thus you will definitely want to avoid:
space, %, &, $, !, *, ?, etc.

I would also recommend against using hash, slash, and period.

Cheers, Frank


--
Frank Miedreich
Max-Planck-Institut fuer psychologische Forschung


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