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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

#81

Post by VHRanger »

josephg wrote: post #80
prepend wrote: post #73

CSV is very durable. If I want it read in 20 years, csv is the way to go until it’s just too big to matter. Of course there are better formats. But for many use cases friends encourage friends to export to CSV.

Eh. I much prefer to produce and consume line delimited JSON. (Or just raw JSON). Its easy to parse, self descriptive and doesn't have any of CSV's ambiguity around delimiters and escape characters. Its a little harder to load into a spreadsheet, but in my experience, way easier to reliably parse in any programming language.

If you send someone JSON there's no guarantee the data is tabular, or even formatted, though

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#83

Post by ravenstine »

VHRanger wrote: post #81
josephg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I much prefer to produce and consume line delimited JSON. (Or just raw JSON). Its easy to parse, self descriptive and doesn't have any of CSV's ambiguity around delimiters and escape characters. Its a little harder to load into a spreadsheet, but in my experience, way easier to reliably parse in any programming language.

If you send someone JSON there's no guarantee the data is tabular, or even formatted, though

Better something that can be parsed than not parsable at all?

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#84

Post by ravenstine »

rietta wrote: post #5

Or export to CSV correctly and test with Excel and/or LibreOffice. Honestly CSV is a very simple, well defined format, that is decades old and is “obvious”. I’ve had far more trouble with various export to excel functions over the years, that have much more complex third-party dependencies to function. Parsing CSV correctly is not hard, you just can’t use split and be done with it. This has been my coding kata in eve…

> Parsing CSV correctly is not hard, you just can’t use split and be done with it.

And yet you can anyway if you are confident that your CSV won't contain anything that would mess it up.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#85

Post by prepend »

This article seems written by someone who never had to work with diverse data pipelines.

I work with large volumes of data from many different sources. I’m lucky to get them to send csv. Of course there are better formats, but all these sources aren’t able to agree on some successful format.

Csv that’s zipped is producible and readable by everyone. And that makes is more efficient.

I’ve been reading these “everyone is stupid, why don’t they just do the simple, right thing and I don’t understand the real reason for success” articles for so long it just makes me think the author doesn’t have a mentor or an editor with deep experience.

It’s like arguing how much mp3 sucks and how we should all just use flac.

The author means well, I’m sure. 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.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#88

Post by 2devnull »

bell-cot wrote: post #19
nsjames wrote: post #2

I think the sad reality there is that it's become "the" format that users expect, and more importantly, it's what's integrated into the majority of peripheral services and tools. Like JSON.

Oh, yes. And even if you can convince the client that they're wrong, and you're right - with substantial client datasets, there's always a load of "data not as previously represented" records. Resolving what is going on with those tends to be vastly easier when you can say "look at record 1,234,567" and they can easily do that in their favorite & familiar software.

Moreover, I myself like being able to open broken csv files in a text editor, to find nulls and other problematic junk.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#89

Post by mr_toad »

rietta wrote: post #5

Or export to CSV correctly and test with Excel and/or LibreOffice. Honestly CSV is a very simple, well defined format, that is decades old and is “obvious”. I’ve had far more trouble with various export to excel functions over the years, that have much more complex third-party dependencies to function. Parsing CSV correctly is not hard, you just can’t use split and be done with it. This has been my coding kata in eve…

> Parsing CSV correctly is not hard

Parsing the CSV you have in front of you is not hard (usually). Writing a parser that will work for all forms of CSV you might encounter is significantly harder.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#90

Post by PeterisP »

Closi wrote: post #12

Of course if you only consider the disadvantages, something looks bad. The advantages of CSV are pretty massive though - if you support CSV you support import and export into a massive variety of business tools, and there is probably some form of OOTB support.

You can do tab-separated "CSV" and it'll be much better, avoid the quoting and delimiter issues that somehow trip up something half the time, and pretty much all these tools have always supported that format as well.
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