Spaceseparated

Spaceseparated refers to a data formatting convention in which fields on a line are separated by whitespace, typically a single ASCII space. It is also known as space-delimited or space-separated values (SSV).

Used in logs, simple data dumps, and human-readable lists, spaceseparated data is easy to generate and quick to read. Many programming environments treat sequences of whitespace as delimiters, which means tabs or multiple spaces may be considered as a single separator or may create empty fields depending on the parser. If every field must be separated by exactly one space, leading or trailing spaces can cause parsing issues.

Advantages and limitations: It is compact and readable, but it is not robust when fields themselves contain spaces. Without quoting, spaces inside a value break the structure; with quoting, the format loses its simplicity.

Parsing and tooling: Languages offer different approaches. Python's split() with no arguments tokenizes on any whitespace; splitting on a literal space may yield empty fields for consecutive spaces. AWK uses the space as the default field separator. In contexts where spaces cannot safely separate fields, substitutes such as tab-separated values, CSV, or a quoting system are preferred.

Best practices: Use a delimiter that does not appear in data; consider quoting fields containing spaces or choosing a delimiter like tab or comma; include a header; specify encoding; test edge cases such as multiple spaces, leading/trailing whitespace, and empty fields.