Re: [VCFtools-spec] Wishlist for 4.2: allow space characters in INFO

[Peter C. <p.j...@go...>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Eric Banks <eb...@br...> wrote:
> Hi Bradford,
>
> I do understand where you're coming from, but truthfully I'd prefer to go in
> the opposite direction once we're open to changing delimiters.  I've never
> quite understood why VCF is tab-delimited and not whitespace-delimited.

Tab separated makes it easy to use in Galaxy, R, etc, even Excel - please
keep that. It is a good thing!

> You wouldn't believe how many times people have manually generated
> VCFs that were space-delimited and couldn't understand why they were
> failing in VCF parsers.

I'd be asking why doesn't your parser give a clearer error message?
If you've seen people fall over this pothole many times the parser
concerned should be fixed.

> I'd much rather that all whitespace be treated equally (as it is
> visually).  It makes for a much simpler spec.

The problem with white space is you can't see how many characters
there are - spaces and tabs are not treated equally visually. What
would you expect if there were several spaces in a row? If you treat
it as one separator you prevent using empty cells (I'm thinking in
terms of generalities here, not just VCF).

Regards,

Peter