Whitespaceseparated

Whitespaceseparated refers to a way of structuring data in which fields or tokens are delimited by whitespace characters, such as spaces, tabs, or newlines, rather than by explicit punctuation like commas or tabs. This approach is common in contexts where simple tokenization is sufficient and human readability is a priority.

In whitespace-separated data, any run of one or more whitespace characters typically acts as a delimiter. Leading and trailing whitespace is usually ignored. Parsing such data can be accomplished with language features that split on whitespace, for example, Python's split without arguments, JavaScript's split with a regular expression for whitespace, or C's scanning with formats that read non-whitespace sequences. The key characteristic is that the delimiter is not a fixed character but a category of characters, which provides flexibility across lines and formats.

While whitespace separation offers simplicity and ease of use, it has limitations. Fields containing spaces can be problematic unless quoted or escaped, or unless a more rigid quoting convention is adopted. This contrasts with formats like CSV or TSV, where explicit delimiters are used and quoting rules can preserve embedded spaces. Whitespace-separated data is common in command-line arguments, certain log files, and lightweight tokenization tasks, where speed and readability are valued over strict schema or nested structures. Best practices include clearly defining which whitespace characters count as separators and how to handle empty fields or embedded spaces.