Re:A love letter to the CSV format
by kmoser on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @11:12PM
(#43490039)
On the off chance you're not being facetious, why not ASCII 0 as a delimiter? (This is a rhetorical question.)
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There are some decent arguments for BEL over NUL, however given you posed that as a rhetorical question I feel I can say little other than
ding! ding! ding! winner winner, chicken dinner!
Although BEL would drive me up the wall if I broke out any of my old TTY hardware.
ASCII has characters more or less designed for this
0x1C - File Separator
0x1D - Group Separator
0x1E - Record Separator
0x1F - Unit Separator
So I guess 1F would be the "comma" and 1E would be the "newline."
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-fil...
I am pretty sure you shifted the meaning, the decimal separator is part of the atomic data it does not need a control character.
You would use 1F instead of the comma/semicolon/tab and 1E to split lines (record means line just like in SQL).
You could then use 1D to store multiple CSV tables in a single file.
Yes but then the text is not human readable or editable in a plain text editor.
This would confuse most users of csvs they are not programmers they at most use text editors and Excel.