The whole point of CSV is that it's simple. You don't need and special libraries. If you can write hello world to a file you can make a CSV and more often than not it'll just work. Yes somethings, like DNA, shouldn't be CSV files. But don't blame the tool for bad craftsmanship. There are more things that it works for than doesn't.
As a side note dates should be ISO 8601
Time to retire the CSV?
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Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#32"In favour of what?", that is the matter. CSV is a format more for humans and less for machines, but that is the use case: a format that is good enough to be compiled by humans and read by machines. At the moment there aren't many alternatives.
Objectively, CSV is terrible for humans despite being a plaintext format. No one reads CSVs: they're incomprehensible since the columns are not aligned with the headings. (You might be drawing an analogy with JSON, which is often human readable because it puts the keys right there next to the values). The best that can be said for its simplicity is that it's easy to write code that can dump data out in CSV format (an…
I'm a human and I love CSVs. What other format can I open in a spreadsheet, access through cat/grep/awk, and easily load into any programming language? Any other format has to sacrifice one of these three things, and that's bad. It's this trifecta that makes it so versatile and human friendly.
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#33CSV will never go away. But surely we can build better systems to handle all the complexities and variability in CSV? If we can handle image recognition with all its complexities, we can handle the more constrained variety in CSVs. There are only so many variations to CSV files, and perhaps a better preprocessor is the answer here versus asking for the near-impossible task of "retiring" CSV.
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#34I find JSON “array of arrays” to be a better solution while also remaining human-readable. Especially when formatted as one array per line, analogous to CSV.
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#35Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#36[deleted]
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#37"In favour of what?", that is the matter. CSV is a format more for humans and less for machines, but that is the use case: a format that is good enough to be compiled by humans and read by machines. At the moment there aren't many alternatives.
I think this issue can be bypassed if a better format such as Arrow or Parquet can be used in Excel.
That doesn't qualify as "good enough to be compiled by humans". We need something dumb and easy you can author from scratch with any text editor, and read/understand with just `cat`.
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#38CSV was a thing long before I was born, so I'm not privy to how it came about. But at least in day-to-day work, the single biggest drawback of CSV in my experience is the fact that the comma and most of the other common delimiters occur regularly in real data, forcing all of the cumbersome escape sequences. To say nothing of someone misplacing a quote somewhere and throwing off the cell count.
So, question to the greybeards: when this format was coming about, why didn't we use one of the dedicated Data Structure separator control codes (e.g. File/Group/Record/Unit separator) that were part of the ASCII standard?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Basic_...
It seems like it would've saved us all several decades of headache.
Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#39Re: Time to retire the CSV?
#40XSLX covers a lot of ground in this area, works with the market leading spreadsheet program, but there are also great libraries to encode and decode them in Python, Java and other languages.