Customizing the way to split Lines into Key/Value Pairs in Hadoop streaming (change field delimiter)

When the Map/Reduce framework reads a line from the stdout of the mapper, it splits the line into a key/value pair. By default, the prefix of the line up to the first tab character is the key and the the rest of the line (excluding the tab character) is the value.
However, you can customize this default. You can specify a field separator other than the tab character (the default), and you can specify the nth (n >= 1) character rather than the first character in a line (the default) as the separator between the key and value.

For example:

$HADOOP_HOME/bin/hadoop jar $HADOOP_HOME/hadoop-streaming.jar \
-input myInputDirs \
-output myOutputDir \
-mapper org.apache.hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityMapper \
-reducer org.apache.hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityReducer \
-jobconf stream.map.output.field.separator=. \
-jobconf stream.num.map.output.key.fields=4

In the above example, "-jobconf stream.map.output.field.separator=." specifies "." as the field separator for the map outputs, and the prefix up to the fourth "." in a line will be the key and the rest of the line (excluding the fourth ".") will be the value. If a line has less than four "."s, then the whole line will be the key and the value will be an empty Text object (like the one created by new Text("")).
Similarly, you can use "-jobconf stream.reduce.output.field.separator=SEP" and "-jobconf stream.num.reduce.output.fields=NUM" to specify the nth field separator in a line of the reduce outputs as the separator between the key and the value.