Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by zelphirkalt on Friday March 11, 2022 @07:33AM (#30639025)

And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by kuschku on Friday March 11, 2022 @11:02AM (#30641519)

In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator

Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by zelphirkalt on Friday March 11, 2022 @03:35PM (#30645662)

I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding ambiguity in the first place.

My software, including my browser, and my operating system is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!) applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on IP address or location of companies or whatever), but actually interpret according to a standard. It is ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator of cells.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by kuschku on Saturday March 12, 2022 @09:21AM (#30651550)

The CSV "standard" is from 2005. Using ; as separator was common in germanic countries for decades before the standard was even written (and CSV was commonly understood as character separated values there).

You can’t easily redefine an existing standard just because you don’t like what everyone else has been doing for the past few decades.

As said, use TSV, which has been standardized for much longer, if you want compatibility.

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