251–260 of 594 posts
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Nope, that's CSV without the drawbacks of CSV. That's CSV that can have special characters and doesn't suffer from delimiter problems. When someone says "Maybe we can fix CSV" this is what you should do instead of trying to "fix" CSV.
Interesting. This is JSON++ somehow. What should it be called? Line-oriented JSON? Row-JSON?
What are good alternatives to CSV that provide all of these features: - easy to parse - easy to edit with a generic text editor - easy to edit with a widely available GUI, like LibreOffice - allow adding more data with only append operations
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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.
You can write what "looks" like CSV to you, but there are no guarantees it will import correctly. The problem is 10x worse when you get CSV from one source and rely on another process to load it. I fought this problem for several days going from NetSuite to Snowflake via CSV.
I don't agree with giving up csvs until the following conditions are met: 1) A truly open format is available and accessible. Csvs are textfiles. There is no system around that cannot open a textfile. If the format is binary or requires patents or whatever, then it's a non-starter. 2) Applications have a speed increase from using csvs. To wit, I loved csvs because often they finish preparing much faster than a "forma…
You're comparing CSVs to other spreadsheet document formats. But a CSV is not a spreadsheet. A CSV is raw data. (It's data that is restricted to a shape that enables it to be easily imported into a spreadsheet—but data nevertheless.) As such, it should be compared to other data formats—e.g. YAML, JSON Lines, etc. These other data formats all win on your #2 against CSV, as CSV is actually horrible at parse-time vs. ot…
In practice, I used TSVs a lot, as tabs do not usually occur in most data. Alternatively, you could use pipes (|) or control characters as field or row separators.
I don't agree with giving up csvs until the following conditions are met: 1) A truly open format is available and accessible. Csvs are textfiles. There is no system around that cannot open a textfile. If the format is binary or requires patents or whatever, then it's a non-starter. 2) Applications have a speed increase from using csvs. To wit, I loved csvs because often they finish preparing much faster than a "forma…
You're comparing CSVs to other spreadsheet document formats. But a CSV is not a spreadsheet. A CSV is raw data. (It's data that is restricted to a shape that enables it to be easily imported into a spreadsheet—but data nevertheless.) As such, it should be compared to other data formats—e.g. YAML, JSON Lines, etc. These other data formats all win on your #2 against CSV, as CSV is actually horrible at parse-time vs. ot…
If you are going to displace a standard, it has to be significantly better than the old.
Lack of types is my biggest gripe with CSV. I think just being able to specify types in column headers would be a win. E.g. “column1:int,column2:string,column3:datetime”. Type inference has bit me too many times.
U+FEFF"aaa","b CRLF
bb","cc"c" CRLF
zzz,yyy,xxx
Unfortunately it is not widely adopted yet and the language support is yet to be improved.
I don't agree with giving up csvs until the following conditions are met: 1) A truly open format is available and accessible. Csvs are textfiles. There is no system around that cannot open a textfile. If the format is binary or requires patents or whatever, then it's a non-starter. 2) Applications have a speed increase from using csvs. To wit, I loved csvs because often they finish preparing much faster than a "forma…
There are few reasons to continue using csv in this day and age.
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SQLite also requires external dependency and special execution environment and are not as portable as CSV.
SQLite is included in most operating systems by default. It's also on macOS and iOS. It also runs on all kinds of embedded devices in addition to personal computers and servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite#Operating_systems