451–460 of 594 posts
Sometimes -- frequently, even -- you have to go to some least-common-denominator format to move data around. CSV is often a candidate.
When I was younger I thought we'd eventually abandon "primitive" formats like this, but in my middle years I realize their extreme utility. CSV absolutely has a place, and absolutely does a job that no other format does as quickly or as easily.
we've resorted to csv files + readme + json files in git for version control.
The contract on what is transfered or how it's mapped in your csv is developer to developer and not in code.
This is a problem and also a benefit.
As long as both systems are designed to read and write the csv correctly(there in also the problem of verification), csv works flawlessly and retains its simplicity.
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…
CSV is far from perfect, but it's nice that I can easily work with them without needing any libraries. All I need is file I/O and the ability to split strings. It doesn't get much simpler. I'll admit though that "import JSON" and then being able to essentially convert the entire file into a dictionary is nice if the data has more structure to it.
CSV is fine .. usually
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CSV is far from perfect, but it's nice that I can easily work with them without needing any libraries. All I need is file I/O and the ability to split strings. It doesn't get much simpler. I'll admit though that "import JSON" and then being able to essentially convert the entire file into a dictionary is nice if the data has more structure to it.
> All I need is file I/O and the ability to split strings. ...until there is a newline inside a field. The moronic quoting mechanism of CSV is one half of the problem; people like you, who try to parse it by "just splitting strings" is the other half. The third half is that it's locale dependent and after 30+ years, people still don't use Unicode.
There are non-printable, non-typable characters specifically defined as separators (ASCII 28-31) with UTF equivalents.
If you use the right characters built specifically for this purpose, then the problems go away.
> It's Time to Retire the CSV > This column obviously contains dates, but which dates? Most of the world It's time to retire local formats and always write YYYY-MM-DD (which is both the international and the Swedish standard, and the most convenient for parsing and sorting). > A third major piece of metadata missing from CSVs is information about the file’s character encoding. It's bloody the time to retire all the c…
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If they were popular they'd be supported in your editor though.
Maybe. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem though. They aren't likely to become popular until editors support them. Also, the fact that they have been around for years and never taken off implies that they probably never will.
Realistically I don't think anyone (at least on HN) would presume that editor support would be so weirdly obtuse, but it's not exactly well-defined here, either.
I'm mostly just thinking out loud, here, not really critiquing anyone.
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Strong agree. TSV is better than CSV always (unless you need to interface with an external system that doesn't accept it). For those not aware, TSV and CSV differ by more than just the delimiting character. TSV has a dead-simple specification: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa... . CSV does not have a standard spec and implementations differ quite a bit, but often in subtle ways.
There's no difference between TSV and CSV but the separator, most good libraries allow you to use any character you wish as the separator. Here's the RFC for CSV - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180