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A comment on Time to retire the CSV?. Parent comment

Re:Time to retire the CSV? by osigurdson on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @11:49AM (#28222966)
Take an Excel file and change the extension to .zip, then extract the contents. You will see that it is a collection of XML files. Therefore it should be reasonable to conclude that this approach can work for Excel sized datasets.

However it is not particularly readable/diff-able if this is part of your use case.

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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by ectopod on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @04:30PM (#28226686)
Excel actually defines a simple XML-based alternative to CSV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#XML_Spreadshee...

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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by unnouinceput on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @01:52PM (#28224738)
Correction: the new xlsx is a zip file, the old xls format is true binary.
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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by dtparr on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @04:57PM (#28227049)
To be fair, xlsx came out with Office 2007, so it's not exactly 'new' anymore. Perhaps at this point it's reasonable for 'excel file' to mean the one that's been the default for 14 years?
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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by mavhc on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @05:42PM (#28227558)
So not the one the uk used to track covid infections, sigh.
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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by shakna on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @07:21PM (#28228447)
The xlsx document is based on the OpenDocument format, which actually came out in '05, so it's a wee bit older than that.
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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by meepmorp on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @08:34PM (#28228991)
Do you mean the OLE-based format, or the really old one?
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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by anigbrowl on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @05:52PM (#28227642)
That's useful to know.
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