A love letter to the CSV format

Re:A love letter to the CSV format by mikepurvis on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @02:04PM (#43484964)

As soon as you give those characters magic meanings then suddenly people will have reason to want to use them— it'll be a CSV containing localization strings for tooltips that contain that character and bam, we'll be back to escaping.

Except the usages of that character will be rare and so potentially way more scary. At least with quotes and commas, the breakages are everywhere so you confront them sooner rather than later.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A love letter to the CSV format by BeFlatXIII on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:55PM (#43488910)

Best to add deliberate breakage to the spec, then.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A love letter to the CSV format by immibis on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:49AM (#43492209)

Graphical representations of the control characters begin at U+2400 in the "Control Pictures" Unicode block. Instead of the actual U+001E Record Separator, you put the U+241E Symbol for Record Separator in the help text.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A love letter to the CSV format by mikepurvis on Thursday March 27, 2025 @09:15AM (#43493287)

.... with a note underneath urging readers not to copy and paste the character because it's only the graphical representation of it, not the thing itself.

Perhaps a more salient example might be CSV nested in CSV. This happens all the time with XML (hello junit) and even JSON— when you plug a USB drive into my LG TV, it creates a metadata file on it that contains {"INFO":"{ \"thing\": true, <etc> }"}

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A love letter to the CSV format by immibis on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:20AM (#43503578)

You wouldn't use this format for that. It's not a universal format, but an application-specific one. It works in some applications, not in others.

[ Parent | on HN ]