As a user, I want validate to allow delimited tables with whitespace-only numeric fields

[jordanpadams]

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🧑‍🔬 User Persona(s)

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💪 Motivation

...so that I can not receive validation warnings for "blank" fields that are padded with whitespace.

📖 Additional Details

Per @edguinness:

Validate (at least versions 3.1.1, 3.4.1, and 3.5.0-snapshot) does not allow field_delimited in table_delimited files to have blank fields (only spaces) for numeric fields. It only allows emply fields cases with two commas and no spaces. The DSV standard says that spaces may be interpreted differently when the application extracts the values. It does not say that blank fields with spaces for numeric values are not allowed. It seems logical that users would include one or more spaces in an empty field for a numeric value for readability and that an empty field may have one or more spaces again for readability. Note that validate allows fields in field_character to consist of only spaces for numeric fields. Validate should parse values the same in both cases and not report errors for the field_delimited case.

Acceptance Criteria

Given a delimited table with an "empty" numeric field padded with space
When I perform content validation on that table
Then I expect the table will validate

⚙️ Engineering Details

Test data: validate_850.zip

Report_char.txt – validation report for table_character
Report_delim.txt – validation report for table_delimited
Vl0xarat.tab – date file
Vl0xarat_char.xml – label using table_character
Vl0xarat_delim.xml – label using table_delimited

[jordanpadams]

Per discussions with @edguinness, moving to icebox for now until the DDWG decides exactly what should occur here.