ABN.ISCAMS@USC-ISID.ARPA (09/12/85)
NetLandians, Common and useful utility is one that "Tabify's" a document -- gets all those long streams of spaces and converts them to appropriate tab equivalents. Two available are Irv Hoff's TAB7 and Leor Zolman's TABIFY4, both available in SIMTEL20's MICRO:<CPM.TXTUTL> archive. (TABIFY4 has C source.) Howsomeever... a wee little problem here with BOTH these programs. They grab all sorts of spaces and change them into tabs, making REAL problems if this particular document is a WordStar (or other) justified document with 2 or more spaces between words. Irv's TAB7 isn't quite so bad - it does NOT tabify a single space, but will gleefully gobble up two of them, replacing with a tab character that LOOKS just fine in WordStar, but wait till you try to reformat that sucker! His doesn't mess with comment fields in a .ASM file, which is a little help anyway. I've found more than one .ASM file, however, that HAS been tabified, and all those nice reserved spaces, like DB ' . ' are now tabified, and my assemblers won't pick that up as a problem (tho the program sure do!). So .. If you're using a TABIFY program (and ESPECIALLY if you're doing it en bulk - found LOTS of these excessively tabified files in the INFO-IBMPC archives), please ensure your TABIFY utility isn't messing up the file. Darned aggravating to do a search & replace for every isolated tab in a document! Incidentally, STRIPPER and STRIP20, the first and latest Tabify/stripping programs I wrote (Turbo Pascal source distributed) do NOT tabify unless there is a string of four or more spaces -- that takes care of the WordStar justified documents! You might want to look at that approach if working on a Tabify program. Regards, David Kirschbaum Toad Hall ABN.ISCAMS@USC-ISID
hes@ecsvax.UUCP (Henry Schaffer) (09/15/85)
> Common and useful utility is one that "Tabify's" a document -- gets all > those long streams of spaces and converts them to appropriate tab > equivalents. > > Howsomeever... a wee little problem here with BOTH these programs. > They grab all sorts of spaces and change them into tabs, making REAL > problems ... > David Kirschbaum > Toad Hall > ABN.ISCAMS@USC-ISID This also can happen with source of programs. Many (most?) compilers don't care about tabs vs. spaces in source *except* in literals. I had one devilishly hard to find bug (because the screen and listings showed a space in the string), and only found it when I used debug to look at the source file. (Yes, I WAS desperate.) --henry schaffer n c state univ