Re:Dangers of CSV Injection
by daveheq on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @03:00PM
(#15444408)
I've used several different characters for escaping, though I don't know why backslash (\) isn't the default universal one. It seems pretty sensible, it's used across multiple scripting languages and CLIs. If you need to escape a backslash, you escape it with a backslash.
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History.
The comma-separated-value file almost certainly comes from list-directed I/O in Fortran, which used doubling of quote characters to "escape" them. This was probably an IBM-thing since other IBM-popularised languages also do this (including SQL and COBOL). As someone else pointed out, RFC4180's own interpretation of "csv" also does this.
My guess is that they did this because parsing and encoding was simple (only a few instructions) on these systems and required no extra memory.