Frank Buss  <fb@frank-buss.de> wrote:
+---------------
| Ken Tilton wrote:
| > Jeez, all I want to do is output data tab-delimited, can I use \t in a 
| > string? no. Does ~t emit a tab? No. Does anything? No. I have to:
| > (format clean "~&~{~a~^~c~}" (loop for f in fields
| >                                  nconc (list f #\tab)))
+---------------

[Minor trivia: "COLLECT F COLLECT #\Tab" probably conses less
than "NCONC (LIST F #\Tab)".]

+---------------
| Your editor sucks! If I didn't overlooked something in the CLHS,
| there is no limitation for the characters you can include in
| strings, e.g. newlines or tabs:
| 
| CL-USER > (format t "~{~A~^
| ~}" '(lisp rules !))
| LISP
| RULES
| !
| 
| CL-USER > (format t "~{~A~^ ~}" '(lisp rules !))
| LISP    RULES   !
| 
| (note: for this usenet posting I have converted tabs to spaces and the
| space in the format string between ^ and ~ should be a tab)
+---------------

I sometimes use recursive FORMATs for this sort of thing:

    > (format t
	      (format nil "~a~c~a" "~{~a~^" #\tab "~}")
	      '(lisp rules !))
    LISP    RULES   !
    NIL
    > 

And, yes, I know it could have been done in the following way,
but IMHO that would be even uglier and less maintainable:

    > (format t
	      (format nil "~~{~~a~~^~c~~}" #\tab)
	      '(lisp rules !))
    LISP    RULES   !
    NIL
    > 


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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