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Time to retire the CSV?

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Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#41

Post by wutwutwutwut »

habitue wrote: post #7
izietto wrote: post #3

"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…

Which format would you propose if I am writing a .NET tool to produce a file to be consumed by Excel?

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#44

Post by Sanzig »

masklinn wrote: post #17
izietto wrote: post #3

"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.

And CSV can be consumed and produced by spreadsheet software, which is useful to critical in many contexts where CSV is part of the pipeline. There the alternative would be to use xlsx files which… isn't necessarily any better. Until someone gets excel to ingest and produce something in a better format, we're pretty much stuck.

As I mentioned down-thread, I can generate a CSV with a couple of fprintf statements and a loop. I definitely can't do that with .xlsx. There is almost zero friction to bolting CSV export capability to an existing system, which is part of why it's so popular.

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

radmuzom wrote: post #28

Every few years an article like this pops up. I find it tiring - because they are primarily from a software engineer's viewpoint who is probably trying to write a parser and needs to handle the edge cases. As a data scientist, I receive and process around 75GB of CSV every day - of course I don't process it manually. Our processes have been running a few years now and millions of dollars of revenue rides on it. I don…

[deleted]

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#46

Post by acwan93 »

izietto wrote: post #3

"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.

Also, "will the other side adopt it?"

After working with so many retailers and online sales channels, things that are considered "legacy" or "outdated" by the HN crowd doesn't seem like it will go away unless both sides make a change. There are numerous articles posted on HN about how "FTP is dead" or no one uses it anymore, when it's far from the case.

Even Amazon's marketplace and vendor files are still using SFTP and EDI files. They've recently made changes, but it's been slow and hasn't had widespread adoption.

There's also the universality and "simplicity" CSV provides to the non-computer literate, and convincing them to make a change to a new standard provides itself some non-technical challenges. CSV is a bad standard, but it's the best one given what it does and its flexibility.

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#47

Post by izietto »

habitue wrote: post #7
izietto wrote: post #3

"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 like CSV instead, it's pretty intuitive to me to provide a list of records separating each column by comma and each record by newline.

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#49

Post by cogman10 »

podiki wrote: post #16

As long as it is text-based. At least you can actually look at a CSV and see what is going (wrong), as well as use all the text tools we have. Not that there aren't problems as the article points out. But some binary file based on the whims of a proprietary program...no thanks.

JSON and XML both make it easy to see what is going wrong and don't have near the same amount of drawbacks that CSV has.

Re: Time to retire the CSV?

#50

Post by madaxe_again »

fighterpilot wrote: post #32
habitue wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Developer friendly. Not human friendly. I used to receive CSVs of product data from clients, which they often handcrafted or manipulated by hand, and inevitably, and I mean inevitably, broke.

Of course, excel will make just as much of a mess - when the client hands back their sheet with all of their UPCs expressed as exponents and æ€ ligatures jammed next to every apostrophe, there’s no guessing as to what happened.

In theory, it’s a great and simple format.

In practice, it causes much pain.

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