On 22 Sep 2016, at 15:48, Costello, Roger L. <costello@m...> wrote:

Hi Folks,

I have a tab-delimited text file. Here is one row of the file:

A             B             C
foo                         bar

The value in field B is optional. In this particular row there is no value for B so it is empty.

I could represent the text file in XML by creating an element for each field and then putting a wrapper element around the elements. For an empty field I could represent that by omitting the element. So here is one way to represent the row:

<Row>
   <A>foo</A>
    <C>bar</C>
</Row>

 

Notice that I omitted the <B> element because the B field is empty.

 

Alternatively, I could represent an empty field with an empty element:

 

<Row>
    <A>foo</A>
    <B/>
    <C>bar</C>
</Row>

 

Notice the empty <B> element.

 

What other ways are there for representing the row? I am particularly interested in seeing other ways that people represent empty fields.  (There are probably an infinite number of ways that the row could be represented. I am interested in the ways that the row is commonly represented.)

 

/Roger