On Jan 19, 5:53 am, "Scott Deardorff" <smd... (AT) bellsouth (DOT) net> wrote:
Sorry to come into this so late. I just wanted to point out that the
"delimiter" does not always have to be a single character. I'd echo
what others have said about the inadvisability of using unprintable
chars. Perhaps you could use something like "#~#" - or any combination
that is absolutely definitely not going to be present as data. What
that string is is up to you and the situation you find yourself in.
Generally, the more chars in your delimiting substring the less chance
there is that they'll be present as data. Of course, if you have the
raw data in the first place you can verify the safety of a chosen
delimiting char or string by doing a simple search. In other cases
you'll have to use your imagination - or take ideas from other
published standards which deal with unknown, and unknowable, strings -
MarkupLanguages for instance. You're almost certainly going to want to
call a subroutine - or handle the whole task in a program - if there's
anything even slightly complicated but you'll probably find that the
end product is not really so complicated after all. We're talking
PickBasic here. Sometimes it takes a more thought/work in order to
come up with the simplest solution.

Then again - you've no doubt got this sorted by now anyway...

Cheers,
Mike.