etlplus.file.tab

etlplus.file.tab module.

Helpers for reading/writing “tab”-formatted (TAB) files.

Notes

• A TAB file is not necessarily a TSV file when tabs aren’t actually the

  delimiter that defines the fields, even if the text looks column-aligned.

• Common cases:

  • Fixed-width text (FWF) that uses tabs for alignment.

  • Mixed whitespace (tabs + spaces) as “pretty printing”.

  • Tabs embedded inside quoted fields (or unescaped tabs in free text).

  • Header/metadata lines or multi-line records that break TSV assumptions.

  • Not actually tab-delimited despite the name.

• Rule of thumb:

  • This implementation treats TAB as tab-delimited text.

  • If the file has fixed-width fields, use etlplus.file.fwf.

Classes

TabFile()

Handler implementation for TAB files.