So easy to get data in and out of an application, opens seamlessly in Excel or your favor DB for further inspection. The only issue is the comma rather than a less used separator like | that occasionally causes issues.
A love letter to the CSV format
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Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#292[flagged]
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with CSV is that there's no clear standard, so even if you do reach for a library to parse it, that doesn't ensure compatibility.
Same for JSON though. What Python considers a valid JSON might not be that if you ask a Java library.
Example? I know there's some ambiguity over whether literals like false are valid JSON, but I can't think of anything else.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#294I like CSV for the same reasons I like INI files. It's simple, text based, and there's no typing encoded in the format, it's just strings. You don't need a library. They're not without their drawbacks, like no official standards etc, but they do their job well. I will be bookmarking this like I have the ini critique of toml: https://github.com/madmurphy/libconfini/wiki/An-INI-critique... I think the first line of the…
> It's simple
My experience has indicated the exact opposite. CSVs are the only "structured" format nobody can claim to parse 100% (ok probably not true thinking about html etc, just take this as hyperbole.) Just use a well-specified format and save your brain-cells.
Occasionally, we must work with people who can only export to csv. This does not imply csv is a reasonable way to represent data compared to other options.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Albeit for fairly justifiable reasons
Justifiable how?
Well, Excel has a lot of common use-cases around processing numeric (and particularly financial) data. Since some locales use commas as decimal separators, using a character that's frequently present as a piece of data as a delimiter is a bit silly; it would be hard to think of a _worse_ character to use.
So, that means that Excel in those locales uses semicolons as separators rather than the more-frequently-used-in-data commas. Probably not the decision I'd make in retrospect, but not completely stupid.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Importing csvs in excel can be a huge pain due to how excel handles localisation. It can basically alter your data if you are not mindful about that, and I have seen it happening too many times.
But it handles it better than Json.
Depends on what you mean by "better". I would rather software not handle a piece of data at all, than handle it erroneously and changing the data without me realising and thus causing all sorts of issues after.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
The _entire_ point of a CSV file is that it's fully human readable and write-able. The characters you mention could be used in a custom delimiter variant of the format, but at that point it's back to a binary machine format.
As soon as you give those characters magic meanings then suddenly people will have reason to want to use them— it'll be a CSV containing localization strings for tooltips that contain that character and bam, we'll be back to escaping. Except the usages of that character will be rare and so potentially way more scary. At least with quotes and commas, the breakages are everywhere so you confront them sooner rather than…
Best to add deliberate breakage to the spec, then.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#298If this was really a love letter, it would have been in CSV format.
Re: A love letter to the CSV format
#299There is a lot not to like about CSV, for all the reasons given here. The only real positive is that you can easily create, read and edit CSV in an editor. Personally I think we missed a trick by not using the ASCII US and RS characters: Columns separated by \u001F (ASCII unit separator). Rows separated by \u001E (ASCII record separator). No escaping needed. More about this at: https://successfulsoftware.net/2022/04/…
Good idea, but probably a non-starter due to no keyboard keys for those characters. Even | would've been a better character to use since it almost never appears in common data.
It is probably unrealistic to expect keyboard keyboard vendors to add new keys. But editors could support adding them through keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + something).
Pipe can be useful as a field delimiter. But what do you use as the record delimiter?