A delimiters component defines a hierarchy of characters or strings that organize the information in a document, such as newlines, spaces, tabs, commas, or vertical bars. You can also use a wildcard pattern to define the delimiters.

The delimiter concept is applicable both to rigidly structured documents that use predefined delimiter characters to separate the data fields, and to loosely structured text or HTML documents that are delimited by newlines and syntactic markup. The delimiter concept also encompasses positionally-structured data, where the fields are located at fixed offsets from one another.

The Parser uses the delimiters to determine the search criteria of

Content

anchors configured with the

LearnByExample

option.

For example, suppose you configure a format with the

TabDelimited

delimiters component. This defines a hierarchy using the following characters as delimiters:

You might define a

Content

anchor that is located two tab characters after the preceding

Marker

anchor in the example source, like this:

When a Parser processes a source document, it searches for the

Content

two tabs after the

Marker

.

In a second example, you might define a

Content

anchor that is located three newlines and one tab after a

Marker

anchor, in the example source.

Within the intermediate lines, the tabs are not counted because the newlines are higher in the hierarchy.

Many of the delimiters components, such as

TabDelimited

or

CommaDelimited

, display a predefined hierarchy of delimiters, which you can edit as required.

The

DelimiterHierarchy

component does not have a predefined hierarchy. You can insert whatever delimiters you need.