I prefer the | pipe character as a delimiter - easy to see, not part of common speech or titles, and enterable via keyboard. Yes, it can exist in the field but less likely.
I think it's like cryptography. Why bother to roll your own when there are people who are cleverer (certainly than me. I don't know about you) who've already put a lot of effort in to this, so just use one of the well tested standard libraries and don't mess with it
point is, being not human readable and having no keyboard key, you can reasonably expect those special separators not to.
I suppose I'd consider such special-separated files (26 to 29 from memory?) to be machine generated and machine readable only, not intended as human readable without a bit of extra software or eg. a special emacs mode
Anyone can edit a csv. I often have. An important feature.
The only real stumper in the CSV format is why they didn't use \ as the escape in strings like everyone else. Probably some good reason.
OTOH the ability to just look at it... that I've found very valuable and agree there.
As much as I wish that beauty or usability was the primary indicator of market success, the simpler explanation that explains all of these (including CSV) is: Microsoft Office supported them.
Microsoft’s binary Excel format is not XML -- you’re thinking of its replacement. It was COM/OLE or some such.
It's basically use the right tool for the job. For pixels that's a binary format. For mostly text, text itself works pretty well.
The whole article pretty well rams home the fact there is no standard B because there is no standard which is adhered to.
But you’re correct that I was using the word “standard” imprecisely to mean something more like “file extension” rather than an IETF RFC.
Do people usually compose CSV data by hand? I thought they would use a program like Excel, enter or generate their data in separate cells and then save the file as a CSV. There's no reason why a program like Excel (or any other program for that matter) couldn't use the record separator instead of a comma as a delimiter when generating or consuming such files.
I do a lot of troubleshooting using CLI tools like grep and wc.
Also, is not necessary to use excel, and a lot of the issues brought up in the article wouldn't be the case with a different delimiter character. Editors could easily be updated to make entering that delimiter character easier to enter by mapping it to a key like tab whenever a file like that is opened.
It just seems like a problem that could be solved, but can't be due to inertia.
Markdown (the original one by John Gruber) does not include any syntax for tables. Other implementations have included it, but there is no standard. As far as I know, using the pipe character to separate columns is indeed quite common, but it is not the only way.
In a business context, this happens far more often than you may expect. Sure you can build a custom platform to validate and make people connect to a form connecting to a database - but Excel is a great user interface and everyone knows excel.
A funny incident - we were struggling to build a complex workflow in KNIME where at some points we need user input. Nothing out of the box was great - tools either assume a dashboard paradigm or a data flow paradigm - nothing In between.
One of our creative folks came up with the solution of writing to a CSV and getting KNIME to open it in excel. The user would make changes and save, close excel and continue the workflow in KNIME. Even completely non technical people got it.
It does this without any notification or warning when you save.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...:
“A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions.”
That paper is from 2016, at least 12 years after the problem was first identified.
If you intended the data to be a string value, then it should have been enclosed in quotes.
Adding a ' before it should work, but for data extracted from arbitrary systems you'll have few guarantees of the sort. Formatting the cells in Excel to display the full value instead of the truncated value also works from memory, but you won't always know ahead of time if this happened later in the file.
In our case it was often mailing identifier barcodes so any loss of precision made them entirely useless.
That's not part of any CSV specification I've seen, including RFC4180.
Fun fact, Excel will truncate numbers beyond 15 digits unless prefixed with a single quote mark.
I do a fair amount of work with companies that do "EDI" over CSV (or worse CSV-like - think 2 CSVs jammed together with different formats, no headers, no support for escaping or quoting) and fixed width documents. I can absolutely assure you that humans do open these files in notepad far more often than I'd like.
Often one of the main reasons they don't use things like X12, ASCII separators, etc. is because a "human needs to open it at some point" was a prevailing business decision some number of years ago (think "what happens if the IT system fails? how can we still ship stuff even in a complete emergency") and now it's baked into their documented process so deeply its like shouting into the wind to alter things. Third party warehouses are the worst at this.
Modifying Csvs with notepad is rife. I'd wager more than using any one particular code editor.
A few years back while working on something that unavoidably used large quantities of CSV data we would sternly warn people not to use Excel, but people still did it ("But I just looked at it!").
And if they had that key on their keyboard then you'd have the comma problems all over again: What if a ASCII record seperator shows up in the field?