[Vince]

Do you realize you're attempting to split an empty string? Let's say you have a basket and a bunch of unsorted fruits. You're trying to sort the fruit in the basket before even having put any fruit in the basket. Not the best analogy but I hope you get my drift.

R33+ does not require sscanf (or other string splitting) because each value is fetched individually. Fetching the whole row as one big string, if it were at all possible, would be counterproductive.