Re:ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
by jarrett on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @04:13PM
(#7476261)
> Precisely what makes them valuable is their difficulty to type or display.
Exactly. A naive[1] character-delimited format is only robust when its delimiter isn't on the keyboard. Which means it's practical to read and write only in specialized applications, not in a text editor. Which sort of defeats the point of a character-delimited format anyway. If your use cases are constrained to specialized applications, you may as well just use JSON or something similar, instead of a character-delimited format. (I'm imagining a world where we get to pick our ideal formats, not one where Excel happens to have an almost-working CSV implementation.)
[1] By "naive" I mean one where the format specification describes record and line characters only. Thus the format has no escaping system.
Exactly. A naive[1] character-delimited format is only robust when its delimiter isn't on the keyboard. Which means it's practical to read and write only in specialized applications, not in a text editor. Which sort of defeats the point of a character-delimited format anyway. If your use cases are constrained to specialized applications, you may as well just use JSON or something similar, instead of a character-delimited format. (I'm imagining a world where we get to pick our ideal formats, not one where Excel happens to have an almost-working CSV implementation.)
[1] By "naive" I mean one where the format specification describes record and line characters only. Thus the format has no escaping system.