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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

#321

Post by junto »

lolive wrote: post #237
gerdesj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only a totally separate data field separator character had been invented early on and been given its own key on the keyboard, coloured: "only use for field delimiting". You know as well as I do that it would have been co-opted into another rôle within weeks, probably as a currency indicator. You should probably use PSV - Point Separated Variable! Obviously we would need to adjust PSV to account for correct French…

Don’t look at the ASCII table, at entries 28 to 31. You are not mentally ready for what you will find there.

> ..what you will find there

Made me laugh, especially since you can’t “see” them.

In fact, that was maybe an oversight when ASCII was designed, but maybe there was a reason for that. If they were visible, and were actually recognizable as separator types then people would know them better.

https://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/ascii-characters

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#322

Post by junto »

GuB-42 wrote: post #97

As a French, there is another problem with CSV. In the French locale, the decimal point is the comma, so "121.5" is written "121,5". It means, of course, that the comma can't be used as a separator, so the semicolon is used instead. It means that depending whether or not the tool that exports the CSV is localized or not, you get commas or you get semicolons. If you are lucky, the tool that imports it speaks the same…

Same in German. We have things like 1.500.021,92 (I.e. 1,500,021.92)

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#323

Post by maxcoder4 »

prmoustache wrote: post #289
nrdvana wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would stay regular if there was a strict governing body for it that wasn't a Webster-style "whatever people are speaking is the new definition of correct". English really is a disaster of a language. There was a(nother) great XKCD about it just a few days ago. https://xkcd.com/2907/

> if there was a strict governing body for it that wasn't a Webster-style "whatever people are speaking is the new definition of correct". There is no way it can work. People don't care about governing bodies when they speak a language.

They kind of do. In my language there exists a central "governing" body that decides what is correct, and some "incorrect" regionalisms are disappearing because of it.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#326

Post by rgmerk »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #210
rgmerk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inertia around CSV in the finance industry is incredibly strong, and let’s just say some of the biggest industry players aren’t exactly reknowned for their cutting-edge practices when it comes to data interchange formats.

For interchange between banks, XML is also very common, because it is usually accompanied with a schema doc.

Yes.

There’s certainly XML. There’s also some very strange hand-rolled formats that are a right pain to parse.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#327

Post by FredPret »

maxcoder4 wrote: post #323
prmoustache wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if there was a strict governing body for it that wasn't a Webster-style "whatever people are speaking is the new definition of correct". There is no way it can work. People don't care about governing bodies when they speak a language.

They kind of do. In my language there exists a central "governing" body that decides what is correct, and some "incorrect" regionalisms are disappearing because of it.

When that happens, it’s likely more about politics and social status than the governing body.

Ie, the governing body decrees that the regionalisms from the dominant region is the definitive version of the language. But it might be considered cool to speak that way even without a governing body.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#328

Post by [deleted] »

Freak_NL wrote: post #279
diogocp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the real world the spec is essentially "Can you import it to Excel?" And the answer to that is always no. You will it think it's yes because it works for you, but when you send it to someone who has a different Excel version or simply different regional settings, it won't work. The recipient will first have to figure out what dialect you used to export.

Oh absolutely. Don't forget about the giant mess Microsoft made in countries like the Netherlands, where Excel will refuse to automatically open comma-separated values files (you know, CSV), unless the separator is a semicolon — because someone in the past thought that was how the Dutch did it. You want people to be able to open your nice and sensible CSV files in Excel? First figure out which arcane locale specific…

[deleted]

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#329

Post by [deleted] »

goatlover wrote: post #234
diogocp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the real world the spec is essentially "Can you import it to Excel?" And the answer to that is always no. You will it think it's yes because it works for you, but when you send it to someone who has a different Excel version or simply different regional settings, it won't work. The recipient will first have to figure out what dialect you used to export.

If the answer was always no, importing CSVs to Excel wouldn't be an expectation or widely used.

[deleted]

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#330

Post by alexvoda »

diogocp wrote: post #129
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…

> in the real world the spec is essentially "Can you import it to Excel?" And the answer to that is always no. You will it think it's yes because it works for you, but when you send it to someone who has a different Excel version or simply different regional settings, it won't work. The recipient will first have to figure out what dialect you used to export.

On the other hand you can now use Power Query to import perquet data into Excel.
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