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by enygmata 2812 days ago
This is not VCS friendly. Resize any column and you have to rewrite 99% of the file, tracking changes becomes hell on earth.
2 comments

Besides VCS unfriendly, the storage space for all the additional space characters provides little utility. For the most part, computers are reading CSV, not humans (though we might scan them).
What do you mean by "resize any column"?
I presume the parent means changing the data s.t. the max length of strings in a column changes; this would cause the padding after that column to change, so as to keep subsequent columns aligned & looking nice. This doesn't play well w/ VCS diffs, as a bunch of data that isn't changing semantically is now changing syntactically, and a simplistic textual diff reflects now that syntactic change, whereas a human reader would want to see the semantic change.

Now… most diff tools also have options to ignore whitespace changes, for cases like this.