Re:So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)
by tonyedgecombe on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:07AM
(#23190794)
I've seen some terrible CSV files where people tried to squeeze hierarchical data into a flat file format. Usually the customer can't provide any sort of schema or documentation because if they could they would have recognised CSV isn't appropriate. This means you are in an endless cycle of fixing the code as unexpected items keep appearing in the data.
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Re:So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)
by jointpdf on Friday May 15, 2020 @12:59PM
(#23194444)
I tend to think of dataframes (R, Python pandas) as the standard way for representing and working with the data contained in a .csv. “List columns” (https://jennybc.github.io/purrr-tutorial/ls13_list-columns.h...) inside dataframes can actually be a convenient way to represent data that is mostly flat, but has some hierarchical data associates it (recent example: dataframe representing a corpus of documents, with a column containing a list of citations). So while .csv probably isn’t the best format to store hierarchical data, it’s fairly trivial to work with if encountered.