delim

Delim, short for delimiter, is a term used in computing to denote a symbol or string that marks boundaries between units of data. Delimiters separate fields within records, indicate the end of a line or frame, or delineate the start or end of a data item in a stream or file. They enable programs to parse and interpret structured text and binary data.

Delimiters can be single characters or strings. Common examples include comma, tab, semicolon, and pipe as field separators in textual data formats; a newline or carriage return can terminate a record; and multi-character delimiters appear in some custom formats. The choice of delimiter affects readability, compatibility, and parsing complexity.

In data processing and programming, the delimiter is often supplied to a function or library that tokenizes or splits input, such as split(delim) in many languages or a CSV parser’s delimiter option. Parsing becomes more complex when fields may contain delimiter characters, are quoted, or require escaping.

Delimiting also appears in protocols and serialization schemes to frame messages or sections, and in tokenization tasks in natural language processing. Practical issues include inconsistent delimiters across data sources, leading or trailing delimiters, and handling of whitespace, encoding, and escaped delimiters.

See also: delimiter, CSV, tokenization, parsing, escaping, data serialization.