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Concept
Delimiter
Summary
A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters for specifying the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text, mathematical expressions or other data streams. An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values. Another example of a delimiter is the time gap used to separate letters and words in the transmission of Morse code.
In mathematics, delimiters are often used to specify the scope of an operation, and can occur both as isolated symbols (e.g., colon in "") and as a pair of opposing-looking symbols (e.g., angled brackets in ).
Delimiters represent one of various means of specifying boundaries in a data stream. Declarative notation, for example, is an alternate method that uses a length field at the start of a data stream to specify the number of characters that the data stream contains.
Delimiters may be characterized as field and record delimiters, or as bracket delimiters.
Field delimiters separate data fields. Record delimiters separate groups of fields.
For example, the CSV format uses a comma as the delimiter between fields, and an end-of-line indicator as the delimiter between records:
fname,lname,age,salary
nancy,davolio,33,25250
tony,raphael,35,$28700
This specifies a simple table using the CSV file format.
Bracket delimiters, also called block delimiters, region delimiters, or balanced delimiters, mark both the start and end of a region of text.
Common examples of bracket delimiters include:
Historically, computing platforms have used certain delimiters by convention. The following tables depict a few examples for comparison.
Programming languages
(See also, Comparison of programming languages (syntax)).
Field and Record delimiters (See also, ASCII, Control character).
Delimiter collision is a problem that occurs when an author or programmer introduces delimiters into text without actually intending them to be interpreted as boundaries between separate regions.
Official source
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