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A love letter to the CSV format

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Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#91

Post by orwin »

mort96 wrote: post #36
boricj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comma isn't my comma. French systems use the comma as a decimal point for numbers and we use semicolons to separate fields in CSV files.

No, french systems also use comma to separate fields in CSV files. Excel uses semicolon to separate fields in France, meaning it generates semicolon-separated files rather than comma-separated files. It's not the fault of CSV that Excel changes which file format it uses based on locale.

That, bad specs, weird management/ timezone/ governance/ communications and random \n\r issues transformed a 2 day fun little project into a 4 week hell. I will never work with CSV in France ever again. Mostly because of Excel, normal CSV nice.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#92

Post by jacobsenscott »

In abstract CSV is great. In reality, it is a nightmare not because of CSV, but because of all the legacy tools that product it in slightly different ways (different character encodings mostly - excel still produces some variant of latin1, some tools drop a BOM in your UTF8, etc).

Unless you control the producer of the data you are stuck trying to infer the character encoding and transcoding to your destination, and there's no foolproof way of doing that.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#93

Post by liotier »

CSV is the bane of my existence. There is no reason to use it outside of legacy use-cases, when so many alternatives are not so brittle that they require endless defensive hacks to avoid erring as soon as exposed to the universe. CSV must die.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#94

Post by [deleted] »

nayuki wrote: post #75
mort96 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSV looks incredibly ugly when opened in a text editor unless all values are 7 characters or less.

There are some specialized text editors for editing files with tabs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_stop#Dynamic_tab_stops , https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ , https://tibleiz.net/code-browser/

[deleted]

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#96

Post by mort96 »

nayuki wrote: post #75
mort96 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSV looks incredibly ugly when opened in a text editor unless all values are 7 characters or less.

There are some specialized text editors for editing files with tabs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_stop#Dynamic_tab_stops , https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ , https://tibleiz.net/code-browser/

If have to use a dedicated tabular data editing program, I may as well use a spreadsheet application. What do the options you propose do better than libreoffice calc?

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#97

Post by Suppafly »

TrackerFF wrote: post #41
gibibit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel won't import ISO 8601 timestamps either, which is crazy these days where it's the universal standard, and there's no excuse to use anything else. You have to replace the "T" separator with a space and also any trailing "Z" UTC suffix (and I think any other timezone/offset as well?) for Excel to be able to parse as a time/date.

Have you tried using the "from text/csv" importer under the data tab? Where it will import your data into a table. Because that one will import ISO 8601 timestamps just fine.

This, it's dumb but Excel handles csv way better if you 'import' it vs just opening it. I use excel to quickly preview csv files, but never to edit them unless I'm OK only ever using it in Excel afterwards.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#98

Post by Suppafly »

bee_rider wrote: post #26
nayuki wrote: post #10

I greatly prefer TSV over CSV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab-separated_values

CSV is a pseudo-standard anyway, IMO the delimiter should be a configurable option (like it is in Unix cut and those kinds of tools).

> IMO the delimiter should be a configurable option

It is. CSV has been character separated vs comma separated for probably decades now. Most tools you'd use to mess with them allow you to specify which separator character is being used.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#99

Post by gibibit »

inglor_cz wrote: post #52
macintux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’m happier when Excel doesn’t try to convert anything. too much bugginess.

Especially gene names. It was so bad that the scientific community renamed the genes in question rather than suffering from the same horror endlessly. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

Just wrong!!

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#100

Post by mort96 »

boricj wrote: post #86
mort96 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, french systems also use comma to separate fields in CSV files. Excel uses semicolon to separate fields in France, meaning it generates semicolon-separated files rather than comma-separated files. It's not the fault of CSV that Excel changes which file format it uses based on locale.

It's even worse than that. Office on my work computer is set to the English language, but my locale is French and so is my Windows language. It's saving semicolon-separated CSV files with the comma as a decimal point. I need to uncheck File > Option Advanced > Use system separators and set the decimal separator to a dot to get Excel to generate English-style CSV files with semicolon-separated values. I can't be bothe…

> It's saving semicolon-separated CSV files with the comma as a decimal point.

It's not though, is what I'm saying. It's saving semicolon-separated files, not CSV files. CSV files have commas separating the values. Saying that Excel saves "semicolon-separated CSV files" is nonsensical.

I can save binary data in a .txt file, that doesn't make it a "text file with binary data"; it's a binary file with a stupid name.

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