Talk:Delimiter

Suggested merge

Delimited has more links to it, but I don't like the idea of a past tense word for the article name. Plinth molecular gathered 15:10, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

merge done ;; content restructured ;; still needs copy editing and link fixes

• Proposed deletion for delimiters which is now covered in this article under bracket delimiters
• changed delimited to delimiter separated values
• reworked intro paragraph
• article still could use editing for tone, accuracy and cross-refs

drefty.mac 23:26, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

content added ;; terminology issues

the term 'entity' was removed as potentially confusing (overlaps with character entities). For now, the term "region of text" is used as a substitute. At issue is: what is a suitable term to use when talking abstractly about different lexical elements of text that get bounded, and therefore defined, by delimiters (eg. comments, fields, records, xml tags, etc). This could use some more research. drefty.mac 03:07, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Dependent internal links

Some of the sections of this article are directly linked by other articles. If you make changes to the headers, please also fix the links.

• Delimiter#Bracket_delimiters

dr.ef.tymac 17:16, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

GA review

This is a pretty good article, but doesn't meet the good article criteria yet. The inline citations are inadequate, as some sections are entirely unreferenced. Also, the section "ASCII armor" is too vague -- it's basically just a mention that something called "ASCII armor" exists, without any real discussion of what it is or where it's applied. The article could also go into a little more detail about which programming languages use which delimiters. Twinxor t 14:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

One thing I'd like to add as well - take the list out of the lead and work it into the prose. That would help it flow better. Readro 22:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Part 2

i am going to pass this. As far as I can tell you have done a excellent job of meeting the concerns posed during the last review. It appears to now meet the GA criterion. Dagomar 08:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Alternate delimiter collision avoidance method

Text does not mention the CSV solution: doubling-up the character, i.e. " becomes "".

Actually, doubled characters count as an escape character which is already included in the article. dr.ef.tymac (talk) 01:43, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Intro is not clear

I'm no computer programmer (took a couple classes), so maybe that explains why. But it would be nice for this to be clear for everyone:

An alternative to the use of field delimiters is declarative notation, which uses a length field at the start of a region to specify the boundary. For word delimiters used in the written form of human languages, see interword separation.

I don't really know how to interpret this. II | (t - c) 03:42, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

The intro has been modified. Feel free to take a re-look and see if that helps the matter any. Thanks for your comment. dr.ef.tymac (talk) 05:22, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

GA De-listing

GA Reassessment

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch
To uphold the quality of Wikipedia:Good articles, all articles listed as Good articles are being reviewed against the GA criteria as part of the GA project quality task force. While all the hard work that has gone into this article is appreciated, unfortunately, as of February 21, 2010, this article fails to satisfy the criteria, as detailed below. For that reason, the article has been delisted from WP:GA. However, if improvements are made bringing the article up to standards, the article may be nominated at WP:GAN. If you feel this decision has been made in error, you may seek remediation at WP:GAR.

Reviewer: --Malleus Fatuorum 16:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

• (FIXED (WP refs removed) 2010-03-12 17:37:21) it makes frequent use of citations to other uncited wikipedia articles,
• (FIXED 2010-03-12 17:17:53) such as citation #9 to Curly bracket programming language.

References

• (FIXED 2010-03-12 16:56:31) There is one dead link. [1]
• (FIXED 2010-03-12 17:11:20) What is citation #19 (Friedl infra)? If it's another reference to Friedl (2002) then the footnotes and bibliography ought to be separated.
• (FIXED 2010-03-12 17:47:42) All citations should provide full details, including publisher and last accessdate.

Needs more explanation in order to be addressed

• This article is almost entirely unreferenced,
• In many parts it reads like a personal essay.

XKCD link

So, despite this kind of thing having led to an essay on the subject which is widely followed, and despite the editor who added the section in question having noted said essay, we've now got a pop culture section which adds nothing to the article save for a completely whimsical reference to a webcomic. Contrary to the revert which put it back in (by the same editor, viva la edit wars), this does not help to explain the subject in any way. This should be removed again, unless I'm missing why this particular bit of cruft is not exactly the same as all the other bits which caused WP:POPCRUFT and WP:XKCD to be written in the first place. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:40, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi Chris, as I mentioned in my commit message, WP:XKCD cites "helpful in understanding a subject" as a reason for inclusion. I believe the inclusion of the strip improves the article, illustrating (in this case literally) why delimiters are important, and how an SQL injection attack works. I do not believe it is cruft, where a topic is mentioned, and fans add the strip merely because of the mention. In fact, the strip doesn't mention "malicious delimiter collision" or delimiters at all by name, but explains the concept better than any paragraph of text ever could. This makes it notable, and should be included. WP:POPCRUFT is primarily aimed at "subjects with broad cultural impact", which delimiters certainly aren't. Pro crast in a tor (talk) 01:10, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

That's an extremely selective quotation from the nutshell text. The essay (which I originally wrote, so I'm pretty familiar with it) gives three basic check points to verify whether it's likely that an xkcd reference is helpful: this reference meets none of them. It is at best a trivial and non-free illustration of an SQL injection attack, which has its own article anyway. People are prone to arguing that a given xkcd strip provides some unique insight into a subject when this is usually extremely subjective. Were this actually the case for a given reference then one would imagine that some third party would pick up on this in a reliable source. That hasn't happened here, so it seems like nothing more than one Wikipedia editor's personal judgement. WP:EL specifically notes when external links are appropriate and again this link doesn't meet those guidelines as applied to the rest of the encyclopedia. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:15, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Nowhere did I argue that it's a unique insight, and I'm not sure why you're projecting that onto me. What I am saying, though, is that it's a helpful illustration on the topic, reinforcing a point with humor. Comic strips sometimes appear in textbooks for this reason, and I have a CS book with a Dilbert strip in it. WP:XKCD doesn't include this as a valid use of a strip, and my thought is that it should. Do you see what I'm saying about illustrations? Perhaps a link in the "In popular culture" is not the best place, but an inline image seems like it would be worse. I do think there should be a place for illustrations on technical topics. I could ask the author for permission if that's an issue. Pro crast in a tor (talk) 20:27, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

That it is uniquely useful is a basic requirement of WP:EL; thus, any argument to include it must implicitly fulfil that requirement. While you may have a CS book including a Dilbert strip, we do not include such things on Wikipedia as a matter of course: the primary reason is that they are non-free. Editors have in the past sought permission from Randall Munroe to relicense xkcd content for us on WP, and indeed if that is successful (as it was for Wikipedia in culture) then there's no problem here; however, for the time being, the link does not fall under the uses given in our guidelines and conventions. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:57, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

WP:POPCULTURE seems a more appropriate guideline than WP:EL. WP:POPCULTURE has a test that seems helpful: "In determining whether a reference is notable enough for inclusion, one helpful test can be to look at whether a person who is familiar with the topic only through the reference in question has the potential to learn something meaningful about the topic from that work alone." This is exactly what I'm trying to say about this particular xkcd strip: it is educational, not just a mere mention of a topic. Pro crast in a tor (talk) 19:16, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Once again, you're cherrypicking lines about usefulness which ignore the larger context of the guideline. This is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill reference to an SQL injection attack. It does not "add anything meaningful" beyond that except to that portion of the Internet's citizens who find stick figures to be objects of hilarity. You explicitly noted in your edit summary that you had recognised these guidelines but were adding a pop culture section for the sake of the article having one. Good articles do not include popular culture references unless they are identified as having influenced popular perception of the subject in some manner; the tests at WP:XKCD (which I'll shortly be moving to WP:POPCULTURE) help to identify which references do and no not fall under that category. This is the latter. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:19, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Delimiter/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: (klat) kirihS 03:55, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Well written

(a) the prose is clear and the spelling and grammar are correct

Seems to be grammatically valid and clear

(b) it complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, jargon, words to avoid, fiction, and list incorporation

The section layout was a bit awkward, but I corrected that on my own. I also removed some unnecessary quotation marks. Beyond that I see no MOS concerns. Jargon is well explained.

Factually written and verifiable

(a) it provides references to all sources of information in the section(s) dedicated to the attribution of these sources according to the guide to layout

Well referenced

(b) it provides in-line citations from reliable sources for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines

Well referenced

(c) it contains no original research

There are a few sections that contain code samples. Preferably we would find a code sample that we can reference instead of a code sample developed by the editors here, but this is something that could go either way.

Broad in its coverage

(a) it addresses the main aspects of the topic

I'm worried there are components of this article that can be significantly expanded to fully cover the topic. For example, the article only briefly touches the surface of field & record delimiters and bracket delimiters. A missing topic is a discussion of when to use one type or the other. What benefits does on pose over the other. Also, the topic of the XKCD comic is interesting and should be discussed in more detail. The article already discusses SQL injection as a possible detrimental effect from parameter collision, but doesn't really discuss the potential implications of this or how the issue is solved. Yes, escape characters are an option, but what about parameterization?

The article does manage to scrape most of teh aspects of the topic, but it doesn't seem to address them. The prose in the article should be fleshed out. Currently, I feel the article only raises the issue instead of discussing and detailing it.

(b) it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).

Despite the fact that I said in section (a) that there is insufficient detail, there may be too many examples of delimiters, actually. This can be distracting to the reader. The table in "bracket delimiters" is very good, however the example style shown in section "escape sequence" can be distracting with little added benefit. Simply discussing how this is done may be preferable, perhaps with a sidebar on the right with an example, rather than two full-width examples. There is no need to write an entire perl statement for such a discussion when a simple string literal (which would be compatible with many languages, actually) would suffice.

Neutral

it represents viewpoints fairly and without bias.

Honestly, I don't think there are any viewpoints to be biased about here.

Stable

it does not change significantly from day-to-day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.

Article is stable

Illustrated, if possible

(a) images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content

Only image is free

(b) images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions

relevant and captioned

General comments

I think this article still needs a little work. It could benefit from expansion of sections, especially those that are almost list-like currently. Instead of discussing the topics, the article currently only brushes up against key points. Some sections are good, but some could use significant elaboration. Until the sections are fully discussed, I can't pass this article for a GA.

Overall

Unfortunately, I must fail this article per the above concerns. --(klat) kirihS 04:18, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Please consider adding chevron information to Delimiter

Suggest we include chevron in this Delimiter article. Perhaps this sentence, which I wrote, would meet your requirements: Angle brackets < and > are also called chevrons in pairs.

Reference:

Also, angle brackets are called chevrons. – Will Hunting Feb 26 '11 at 20:03

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14252/what-is-the-common-name-for-brackets-braces-and-parentheses

Chevrons are infrequently used to denote dialogue that is thought instead of spoken, such as:

   < What a beautiful flower! >

http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Bracket

They are loosely referred to as angled brackets or chevrons...

http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Bracket

...angled brackets, or chevrons: < >.

http://thewritingresource.net/2011/01/20/punctuation-point-how-to-use-brackets/

Submitted by Sponsion (talk) 16:22, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Article does not discuss its topic

This article does not deserve the praise it has received. Most of it is beside the point, and the subject proper is barely touched.

The subject, as described in the introduction, is delimiter. Not programming languages, not injection techniques. The discussions of Perl et al. syntaxes are beside the point.

In discussing the delimiter, maybe delimited files are germane. Escape techniques certainly are, since escapes influence the interpretation of the delimiter. Unfortunately, the notion of escaping is left undefined. Somehow the discussion of doubling as an escape got completely garbled, as though 'Nancy''s dress' and 'Nancy\'s dress' were unrelated. The list of "problems" with escape sequences is bewildering.

The article makes no reference to language theory, nor how the choice of a delimiter is implicitly a grammar. CSV, for example, is not a regular language and thus cannot be parsed using a regular expression. The reader, to the extent he can learn anything at all from the article, is left to conclude that any system of delimitation is arbitrary, and equivalent to any other.

Far from from qualifying as a Good Article, nearly everything after the introduction should be deleted, and a new effort made to describe the topic.

--Jklowden (talk) 19:04, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

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It just moved. Fixed. Guy Harris (talk) 20:52, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

References for delimiters being used by convention

A list of C0 control characters, and a list of ASCII graphics characters, are not references for any of those characters being historically used by convention. Documentation of those conventions would be references for that. Guy Harris (talk) 17:35, 3 August 2017 (UTC)