delimited fields

[Russell Fulton]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 17:09:44 -0400 Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> 
wrote:

> Hey Russell,
>    So, right now, when we print out the unreachable port
> numbers (using the -R option (response data)) you'll
> still see the same column number.  We print the two
> text fields in the Src and Dst Byte fields.
> 
>    Frag reports still need to be implemented but they
> were going to also have the same number of columns of
> whatever.
> 
>    So with the FIELD_DELIMITER support we can do what
> you suggest, however the default "pretty" output,
> will end up with unbalanced output.  Do we want to
> consider the "pretty" output as an exception?
> 

I assumeby pretty you mean the traditional ra output we know and love 
;-) Since this is designed to be read by humans it is important to keep 
it easy to interpet and 'pretty'.  If I was forced to choose between 
ease of handling delimited output for machine and ease of interpreting 
human output I would opt for maintaining the human output every time.  
After all cpu cycles are cheap and use perl hackers can cope with 
anything ;-)

One thing I don't quite understand is why the two formats should be 
linked.  Anyway this certainly isnt a big deal as far as I am 
concerned.  The current state is a great improvement on the 1.8.1 
format from the programming point of view.

Cheers, Russell