Please read the more recent version of this paper
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Abstract
A typical TCL script stores its internal data in lists and arrays
(the two primary data structures in TCL). Suppose you want to write a TCL
application that can save its data on disk and read it back again. For example,
this allows your users to save a project and load it back later. You need a way
to write the data from the place where it is stored internally (lists and arrays)
to a file. You also need a way to read the data back into a running script.
You can choose to store the data in a binary form, or in a text file. This paper
is limited to textual data file formats. We will look at a number of
possible formats and how to parse them in TCL. In particular, we will show some
simple techniques that make text file parsing a lot easier.
This paper assumes that you are familiar with TCL, and that you have written at
least a few simple scripts in TCL.
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