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by amyjess 2733 days ago
Back when I worked at an NLP company, my boss used to say that he was "morally opposed to CSV".

When sharing tabular data in text format, he always preferred TSV because commas were everywhere in the material we were working with, but tab characters were really rare.
2 comments
shabbyrobe 2733 days ago
I've always been curious about the characters in ASCII for this, but I've never seen them used in the wild. Stuff like "Group Separator" (0x1D), "Record Separator" (0x1E) or "Unit Separator" (0x1F)

Is there a reason why nobody uses these? Did someone work out back in the 90s they were pure evil and we've just never used them since?

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mikestew 2733 days ago
https://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/ascii-characters.html

Those codes were originally for just such a purpose, but as others point out there was a bootstrapping problem. At this point, if Excel doesn’t support it, it’s not going to gain traction.

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coredog64 2733 days ago
About 10 years ago I had to use those for a financial system integration. I was getting files that had been created on a mainframe, and whoever wrote it originally had the foresight to use those characters. Probably because they were based out of EMEA and understood that commas weren’t useful across national borders.
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GnarfGnarf 2733 days ago
The codes between x01 and x1F were designed for telecommunications, for instance binary custom formats over RS-232 or synchronous protocols.

There is an excellent description in "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications" by Joe Campbell.

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euos 2733 days ago
There’s no physical key for them. You can trivially write/edit CSV or TSV on any computer using any editor.
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mirimir 2733 days ago
Indeed. I used to clean up data in UltraEdit. With the option for direct disk read/write set, there was virtually no file-size limit.
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mirimir 2733 days ago
When I was working as a forensic data analyst, I felt pretty much the same. If you request CSV in discovery, there's no telling what you'll get. I mean, the data may come from custom COBOL, and then get reviewed by someone using Excel.

So yes, TSV. However, I've seen TSV with spurious tabs :(

Sometimes I ended up pushing for |-delimited data. Or even fixed-width format :)

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