News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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

Re:Time to retire the CSV? by bsg75 on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @08:18PM (#28228889)
Never write your own parser, especially as just string.split(), and when possible don't use C(omma)SV formats, but C(haracter)SV, aka DSV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter-separated_values

There are non-printable, non-typable characters specifically defined as separators (ASCII 28-31) with UTF equivalents.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Time to retire the CSV? by 7thaccount on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @11:17PM (#28229965)
As printed above, I'm not writing software where that would be a problem. In general if I was writing a commercial application or something in production where I don't control all the inputs I would agree 100%, but I'm lucky to not have those problems. I could use a bunch of libraries and additional code to try to catch non-existent errors I don't have, or fix my actual problems and move on.

I appreciate the perspective though for sure. I'm guilty of the same thing on HN, where I assume people have the same uses as me when they're writing code that has to be extremely robust or blazingly fast.

[ Parent | on HN ]