Re:Show HN: Npm module that makes easy to convert JSON to CSV
by billforsternz on Thursday June 08, 2017 @08:23PM
(#14518286)
Interesting. Certainly it was only a subset of customers who were complaining, and in the office it was a subset of Excel installations which could reproduce the problem. There's no doubt what the problem was and how to fix it. There is a doubt about exactly which Excel and Windows combinations are problematic, and how prevalent that combination is amongst New Zealand installations.
A semi-colon is generally used as the default list separator when the region/locale uses a comma as the decimal separator for numbers. For example Dutch (Netherlands) uses a comma for the decimal separator (ex. 3,14) whereas in English (US) we use a decimal point (ex 3.14). If comma were used as the default list separator in such a region then all floating point numbers would need to be quoted (ex. "3,14") which would make the size of the CSV file larger and also make the file less human-readable