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§16.9. Blank rows

There is no difficulty about entirely blank rows: or rather, the only difficulty is once again that they are boring to type out. We can avoid the necessity by appending "with ... blank rows" at the foot of the table:

paste.png Table 2 - Selected Elements

Element

Symbol

Atomic number

Atomic weight

"Hydrogen"

"H"

1

a number

"Iron"

"Fe"

26

--

"Zinc"

"Zn"

30

--

"Uranium"

"U"

92

--

with 3 blank rows

(These words cannot be placed in between rows, but only at the bottom.) And indeed the table can start out completely empty:

paste.png Table 3 - Undiscovered Periodic Table

Element (text)

Symbol (text)

Atomic number (a number)

Atomic weight (a number)

with 92 blank rows

Blank rows are useful because they enable us to add new data to a table. In effect, they are invisible when not used. A repeat loop like

repeat through Table 3:
    ...

automatically skips blank rows, so it would initially do nothing at all. Similarly, choosing a "random" row will never choose a blank one.

A convenient way to test if a table contains non-blank rows is to use the built-in adjectives "empty" and "non-empty". So:

if the Undiscovered Periodic Table is empty, ...

tests whether all of its rows are blank; if even one cell contains a value then the table is "non-empty".


arrow-up.png Start of Chapter 16: Tables
arrow-left.png Back to §16.8. Blank columns
arrow-right.png Onward to §16.10. Adding and removing rows

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