The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
A delimiter is a character (or contiguous set of characters) used to separate pieces of data within a file or to designate the beginning or end of a programming construct. Without delimiters the interpretation of a stream of data would be more complex.
The programming language or operating system usually dictates the characters used as delimiters. Programming languages use a variety of delimiters to indicate comment information and special processing requirements. Command line usage of delimiters commonly includes the backward slash (\) and forward slash (/). Data files commonly use commas, semicolons, or tabs as delimiters.
Additionally delimiters are used both as separators between individual data fields and as terminators at the end of a data file. To avoid confusion these field-level and file-level delimiters must be different characters, and they must not appear within the data itself. The program processing the data file must understand how to process each delimiter in order to interpret the contents of the data file.