For your survey tally, in this XSLT 2 conversion of TSV and CSV to XML:
http://www.CraneDoftwrights.com/resources/#csv
... I chose the latter, that the B element be empty:
T:\ftemp>java -jar saxon9he.jar
-it:{http://CraneSoftwrights.com/ns/parseTSV}start
-xsl:..\Crane-ParseCSV-20130708-2010z\Crane-ParseTSV.xsl
"filename=../ftemp/roger.txt" "record-name=Row"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<result>
<Row>
<A>foo</A>
<B/>
<C>bar</C>
</Row>
</result>
T:\ftemp>type roger.txt
A B C
foo bar
T:\ftemp>
I elected to do it this way by deciding that the zero-length string
between the end of A and the beginning of C was the value of B, not
an indication of its absence.
From a downstream application's perspective, it doesn't need
knowledge of a document model to know what is absent as all fields
have values, which may be empty. If the B element were absent, the
downstream app would have to have foreknowledge of the possibility of
the B element. And that is fine. But if every record had an empty
string for the B element, then the downstream app wouldn't know that
B was even possible.
I hope this is helpful.
. . . . . . . . Ken
At 2016-09-22 14:48 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>I have a tab-delimited text file. Here is one row of the file:
>A B C
>foo bar
>The value in field B is optional. In this particular row there is no
>value for B so it is empty.
>I could represent the text file in XML by creating an element for
>each field and then putting a wrapper element around the elements.
>For an empty field I could represent that by omitting the element.
>So here is one way to represent the row:
><Row>
> <A>foo</A>
> <C>bar</C>
></Row>
>
>Notice that I omitted the <B> element because the B field is empty.
>
>Alternatively, I could represent an empty field with an empty element:
>
><Row>
> <A>foo</A>
> <B/>
> <C>bar</C>
></Row>
>
>Notice the empty <B> element.
>
>What other ways are there for representing the row? I am
>particularly interested in seeing other ways that people represent
>empty fields. (There are probably an infinite number of ways that
>the row could be represented. I am interested in the ways that the
>row is commonly represented.)
>
>/Roger
>
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