Append a record to the end of a text file: Difference between revisions
Append a record to the end of a text file (view source)
Revision as of 12:56, 13 September 2017
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In the absence of a length indication, when outputting text variables with a view to having them read in again, delimiting them with quotes (and doubling internal quotes) is the route to peace of mind, because otherwise a text might contain a comma as in "43 Gurney Road, Belmont" and in the absence of quoting, such a sequence on input might well be taken as two fields rather than one and a mess is certain. This facility is offered by the free-format (or, "list directed") style initiated by the use of * in place of a format label, as in <code>WRITE (MSG,*) ''etc.''</code>, provided however that the output file has been opened with the optional usage attribute <code>DELIM = "QUOTE"</code>, an unfortunate choice of name, because the field separator character could also be termed a "delimiter" and the default value is both a space or comma, when often what is preferable is only a comma, or even a tab. But there is no standard method to specify this desire. Only if the texts never themselves contain commas or spaces will this unquoted free-format scheme evade extra effort, and the specified example precludes this simplicity.
The resulting output is strung along an output line, with a default line length of 132 (a standard lineprinter width); the specification of RECL = 666 ensures that all the output fields are rolled to one line - that isn't padded out to 666 characters: this is not a fixed-length record despite the specification of RECL as a constant, though each record turns out to be 248 characters long. Unfortunately, the trailing spaces in each character variable are rolled forth and there is no option along the lines of <code>WRITE (MSG,*) TRIM(NOTE)</code> One could instead use a suitable FORMAT statement with "A" format codes, but every element of NOTE would have to be named in the output list and the TRIM function applied only to each character field. Not only would this be tedious and error-prone, there is no format code for the enquoting and double-quoting of the texts and thus, no peace of mind... One would of course devise a subroutine to write out such a record (which would probably be more complex, with the FULLNAME subdivided, etc.), but the task's main objective is to demonstrate appending output to a file.<lang Fortran> PROGRAM DEMO !As per the described task, more or less.
TYPE DETAILS !Define a component.
CHARACTER*28 FULLNAME
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