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by kijin 2733 days ago
> I've even seen CSV with values that contain ``","``!

Are you sure it wasn't an injection attempt of some kind?

1 comments

It could have been, I suppose.

But more likely is twisted creativity. It seems that some businesses are still using ancient systems, based on COBOL, AS/400, etc. There's resistance to changing legacy code. So when business changes require additional data fields, fields sometimes get subdivided. So a field that originally contained stuff like |foo| now contains stuff like |"foo","bar,baz"| or whatever. That works, because there's nothing like CSV in the data system. But when someone tries a CSV export, you get garbage.