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The article talks about reading and parsing CSV data of unknown variants, but then skips to the solution being using a different format altogether. But you can only switch to a different format if you are producing data, not if you are reading it! And if you are in control of producing data, just produce strict RFC 4180-compliant CSV data and everybody will be able to read it just fine. There is no need to make your…
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I have in fact seen CSV files used as an interchange format for things that include non-plaintext fields. And I've seen nested CSV files.
The only real benefit of CSV (other than that it is widely supported) is that it is easy for humans to read and write. The approach in this article solves the quoting problem, but also removes that benefit. If you have the power to move from CSV, surely JSON would be better if you need to keep the human readable/writable feature. And if you don't need it, there are other more featureful binary formats out there like…
You can’t put comments in JSON, while that’s fairly easy in CSV. This makes JSON unusable most of the time for human-editable data.
The article talks about reading and parsing CSV data of unknown variants, but then skips to the solution being using a different format altogether. But you can only switch to a different format if you are producing data, not if you are reading it! And if you are in control of producing data, just produce strict RFC 4180-compliant CSV data and everybody will be able to read it just fine. There is no need to make your…
Tbf, ASCII delimiter characters have been around since the 1960s. They're not exactly reinventing the wheel
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Don't use broken tools. The key phrase is "in control of producing data". If you're forced to use Excel, then it's not really you in control, is it?
> Don't use broken tools.
Tell that to your accounting and finance department and let us know how the message is received.
> If you're forced to use Excel, then it's not really you in control, is it?
In which case the up-thread's advice to "just produce strict RFC 4180-compliant CSV data" is worthless. "Just."
We're stuck with whatever CSVs we get, so 'just' doing X is not an option.
The author seems to ignore the fact that CSV got so popular because it is human readable. If anyone wanted a binary format there’s plenty of them - most better than this DSV. Also, I’m on a mobile right now, so can’t verify that, but it seems the format is flawed. The reader decodes UTF8 strings after splitting the binary buffer by the delimiter, but I believe the delimiter may be a part of a UTF8 character. Edit: ju…
It might seem that way if you didn't actually read the article:
> So what’s the downside? This custom FEC tooling might give you a hint.
> For starters, it’s rather unreadable when opened in a text editor.
As other said, most of the times, if you are producing them, just produce them right, or choose other formats.
If you don't then pray for the best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aka a completely different use case than CSV.
> Aka a completely different use case than CSV. How many CSVs are generated, edited, or viewed by Notepad.exe and how many by Excel (or Google Sheets)? I would posit the vast majority of CSVs are generated through some kind of program where you go to File > Export or File > Save As…. In which case doing selecting a drop down with the option for File Format to be TSV or DSV (with the corresponding file extension) woul…
If only... Every time I have to do any major work with CSVs, I re-lament this exact thing. I think the only way this could ever become more widespread is to fix all the open source tooling so that it's eventually just supported everywhere - then keep evangelizing for... ~30 yrs. Probably you should also register a new mime type and extension and make it a new thing - don't overload .CSV any further - but make the sam…
If time could be turned back, a good idea would be to make CSV mean CSV. Not semicolon separated values, not any other thing separated values, but only comma separated values. To not overload the name in the first place.
Ban those things and it starts to become reasonable enough for general use.