Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ooh, which companies? I haven't come across any yet.
Eg. http://www.trifacta.com/ founded by the guys who started DataWrangler :)
Thanks!
CSV as a Data Source
51–53 of 53 posts
Re: CSV as a Data Source
#52CSV is the biggest pile of nuisance you'd never expect from a seemingly simple data format. - Header line or none? - "\n" or "\r\n"? - Is there a newline at the last line? How about two? - Escape quotes with doubling or backslash? How about both in the same file? How about both, inconsistently, in different fields? How about quotes including a newline and commas? - Strings always quoted? Only if necessary? Is ,, a nu…
There is something called ARFF which is basically a CSV with a header that defines how to interpret data, a bit of documentation and a reference implementation.
Re: CSV as a Data Source
#53CSV is the biggest pile of nuisance you'd never expect from a seemingly simple data format. - Header line or none? - "\n" or "\r\n"? - Is there a newline at the last line? How about two? - Escape quotes with doubling or backslash? How about both in the same file? How about both, inconsistently, in different fields? How about quotes including a newline and commas? - Strings always quoted? Only if necessary? Is ,, a nu…
Chartio actually will accept TSV files because it will detect most of these settings. It'll detect the delimiter, the presence of a header line, file encoding, and newline character(s). I agree TSV is a lot nicer, and has the bonus that Excel will open a TSV file with an .xls extension without any problems (great for sharing!).
Back in the '80s, TSV was the standard way to work with data for us - and for many years Lotus, Quattro Pro and Excel (when it came out) could easily save directly to TSV and open TSV without problems.
Don't know why Excel and Windows no longer recognize the TSV extension as a unique file format, but it is easily fixed without having to go through the .xls extension route [which can be a bit of a pain since it requires identifying delimiters every time one opens a file].
The quickest solution I found is a 2 line batch file for Windows described here [1]. I've used this solution without issues on multiple computers. TSV is my preferred file format for data work. [I generally analyze data in Python and R and use Excel for looking at results or formatting a pretty version to send to others that prefer Excel.]
[1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/1890...