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Friends don't let friends export to CSV

kaveland.no

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Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#181

Post by deathanatos »

Dalewyn wrote: post #154
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. His arguments are basically "performance!" (which is honestly not important to 99% of CSV export users) and "It's underderspecified!" And while I can agree with the second, at least partly, in the real world the spec is essentially "Can you import it to Excel?". I'm amazed at how much programmers can discount "It already works pretty much everywhere" for the sake of more esoteric improvements. All that…

>I do hope "Unicode Separated Values" takes off. It's essentially just a slight tweak to CSV where the delimiters are special unicode characters Commas can be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by anyone. Special Unicode Characters(tm) can't be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by noone. Convenience is a virtue.

> Special Unicode Characters(tm) can't be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by noone.

While I'm not a fan of USV, I do believe it is type-able on both macOS and Linux¹. The IME's character picker in both OSes contains all of the necessary characters, I think. (I use "␤" in commit messages, occasionally. That was a typed ␤, not copy/pasted from a Google query or such.)

It would be quite tedious, I do admit; reasonably typed by someone, probably not.

I don't normally type out CSVs by hand either, though.

(¹I don't know about Windows as I simply haven't cared about it in years. For all I know, they've grown an IME in the intervening decade.)

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#182

Post by chirau »

quesera wrote: post #132

Every single use I've ever seen of CSV would be improved by the very simple change to TSV. Even Excel can handle it. It is far safer to munge data containing tabs (convert to spaces, etc), than commas (remove? convert to dots? escape?). The better answer is to use ASCII separators as Lyndon Johnson intended, but that turns out to be asking a lot of data producers. Generating TSV is usually easier than generating CSV.

you are assuming the regular end user knows the difference between 4 spaces and a tab and the nuances that come with them trying to replace one with the other or why space between two values is different at one point from the next.

Commas are, by far, better delimeters than tabs in the grand scheme of things and with both expert and regular users considered.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#183

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

albert_e wrote: post #179
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember the last time I, or anyone I've ever worked with for that matter, ever typed up a CSV from scratch. The whole point of USV is that the delimiters can't normally be typed so you don't have to worry about escaping. USV supports displayable delimiters (see https://github.com/SixArm/usv ), so for the much more common case of editing an existing CSV in a text editor, you can just copy and paste.

Everyone of us was a beginner at some point. The first time we came across CSV format we likely typed it in notepad by hand. A lot of issues with CSVs are also sometimes troubleshooted by hand-- by manually fixing a quote or a comma. There is value is the ability to do this level of editing and troubleshooting.

> The first time we came across CSV format we likely typed it in notepad by hand.

Again, I'm not saying CSVs aren't edited by hand in a text editor, I'm saying they aren't created from scratch in a text editor, even by beginners. USVs are easy to edit in a text editor, too, and I tried viewing and editing USVs with a couple different fonts and had no problems.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#184

Post by throwitaway222 »

I'd rather work with someone that prefers a format, but doesn't write articles like this. It's fine to "prefer" parquet, but CSV is totally fine - whatever works mate.

When you hit the inevitable "friends don't let friends" or "considered harmful" type of people, it's time to move quickly past them and let the actual situation dictate the best solution.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#185

Post by QuiDortDine »

> You give up human readable files, but what you gain in return is incredibly valuable

Not as valuable as human-readable files.

And what kind of monstrous CSV files has this dude been working with? Data types? Compression? I just need to export 10,000 names/emails/whatevers so I can re-import them elsewhere.

Like, I guess once you start hitting GBs, an argument can be made, but this article sounds more like "CSV considered harmful", which is just silly to me.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#186

Post by croes »

quesera wrote: post #132

Every single use I've ever seen of CSV would be improved by the very simple change to TSV. Even Excel can handle it. It is far safer to munge data containing tabs (convert to spaces, etc), than commas (remove? convert to dots? escape?). The better answer is to use ASCII separators as Lyndon Johnson intended, but that turns out to be asking a lot of data producers. Generating TSV is usually easier than generating CSV.

Don't change the data by replacing the separator. If the data contains a comma, tab etc. I want to receive a comma, tab etc.

With proper escaping the separator doesn't matter.

After that csv generating is pretty easy.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#187

Post by lostlogin »

doctor_eval wrote: post #168
lostlogin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there unicode characters specifically for delimiters? We could use the HL7 pipe ‘|’ and all enjoy that hell.

It’s been years since I last worked with HL7. Isn’t there also ^ and ~ to deal with? Hell indeed.

There is the white space bs too. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. What type of white space is it?

Seriously rough.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#188

Post by lmm »

prepend wrote: post #167
chaps wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this getting downvoted? They're right that the criticism is pretty excessive: "Maybe his next article will be about how airlines should speak Esperanto because English is such a flawed language. That’s a clever and unique observation." Hm.

I got a little snarky but I think the analogy holds. Esperanto is a superior language to English. And English has many flaws. Theoretically it would be better to have all pilots and airports learn an efficient language. But it would be stupid and immature to seriously write a blog post about that, especially without talking about all the flaws in that plan.

> Esperanto is a superior language to English.

Not really. You can say it's more regular but that's because it sees barely any actual use; if it ever gained popularity it wouldn't stay regular. (And given that pilots speak in set phrases anyway, irregularity isn't really an issue). It's not a great language by any stretch, it's an awkward mismash of four european languages; sure it sounds kind of nice in an Italianate way, but if that's what you want then why not just speak Italian?

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#189

Post by croes »

>Numerical columns may also be ambigious, there's no way to know if you can read a numerical column into an integral data type, or if you need to reach for a float without first reading all the records.

Most of the time you know the source pretty well and can simply ask about the value range.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#190

Post by croes »

quesera wrote: post #132

Every single use I've ever seen of CSV would be improved by the very simple change to TSV. Even Excel can handle it. It is far safer to munge data containing tabs (convert to spaces, etc), than commas (remove? convert to dots? escape?). The better answer is to use ASCII separators as Lyndon Johnson intended, but that turns out to be asking a lot of data producers. Generating TSV is usually easier than generating CSV.

BTW is Excel better in reading UTF8 files?

Last time I checked it can't read it without errors if you just open the file with it without using the import function an explicitly select UTF8.

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