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[Damian Counsell]

Peter!


* Peter Rice <pmr at ebi.ac.uk> [031208 11:49]:
> Damian Counsell wrote:
> >This may be a completely stupid suggestion, but, if you don't ask...
> >
> >Could we have decimal tabs, please?  You know: ones smart enough to
> >align themselves by the position of the floating point, even in the
> >absence of specifying the number of digits before and after it?
> 
> Hmmmm ...
> 
> What really happens to these data types is that the values are all 
> strings written by the calling program and stored as tag=value pairs in 
> an internal feature table.
> 
> On output, the (string) tag value is reported.
> 
> "str" tags are left justified
> Anything else is right justified.
> 
> We could try, for floats, reading the value in and rewriting it in a 
> fixed precision. A small overhead but maybe worth it.

Thanks for the explanation.  If no one else has any objections this
sounds fine to me.

> We could also try removing extra trailing zeroes in some cases.

I have no problem with trailing zeroes when there is consistent and
controllable length and precision in the output.  Leading zeroes are
another matter; the right number of leading spaces would be the ideal
solution for me of course.


all the best

Damian

-- 
MRC Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomics Research 
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SB, UK
phone: +44 (0)1223 494585        fax: +44 (0)1223 494512
email: d.counsell at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Web: http://www.rfcgr.mrc.ac.uk/~dcounsel/