[chemfp] tab-only instead of tab-or-space

[Andrew Dalke]

I've talked to a number of people about chemfp.

Two of them pointed out that they use identifiers which
contain a space. One is a company with corporate IDs that
contain a space (yech!), and another wants to use IUPAC
names as identifiers.

It's easy enough to say that the fields in the FPS format
are separated by one and only one tab, instead of the
current, which is one tab or one space.

I am considering making this a tab-only format.

What I'm concerned about is how that makes it slightly
more complicated for people to write the format.

I also have my experience that working with tab files
is just a bit more complicated. It's hard to see tabs,
and editors do strange things with them.

I figure if you're on this list then you can handle
writing a \t. Do you have any feel of what sorts of
issues might come up, and if others - the more
non-programmer computational chemists that this format
is meant for - might have problems with a tab-only format?


				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com