[hnlmorg]

CSV (and it's derivatives) made some sense 20 years ago but these days if you want to make your lives easier with tables you're better off using jsonlines.

  ["Name", "Session", "Score", "Completed"]
  ["Gilbert", "2013", 24, true]
  ["Alexa", "2013", 29, true]
  ["May", "2012B", 14, false]
  ["Deloise", "2012A", 19, true]

Plenty of tools, including some I've written myself, support it.

https://jsonlines.org/examples/

https://murex.rocks/docs/types/jsonl.html

[867-5309]

that's just CSV with unnecessary square brackets and whitespace

[hnlmorg]

As someone who's written parsers for both CSV and jsonlines, I can assure you that you could not be further from the truth:

1. The whitespace is optional. It's just put there for illustrative purposes.

2. Whitespace in CSV can actually corrupt the data where some parsers make incompatible assumptions vs other CSV parsers. Eg space characters used before or after commas -- do you trim them or include them? Some will delimit on tabs as well as commas rather than either/or. Some handle new lines differently

3. Continuing off the previous point: new lines in CSVs, if you're following IBM's spec, should be literal new lines in the file. This breaks readability and it makes streaming CSVs more awkward (because you then break the assumption that you can read a file one line at a time). jsonlines is much cleaner (see next point).

4. Escaping is properly defined. eg how do you escape quotation marks in CSV? IBM's CSV spec states double quotes should be doubled up (eg "Hello ""world""") where as some CSV parsers prefer C-style escaping (eg "Hello \"world\"") and some CSV parsers don't handle that edge case at all. jsonlines already has those edge cases solved.

5. CSV is data type less. This causes issues when importing numbers in different parsers (eg "012345" might need to be a string but might get parsed as an integer with the leading space removed. Also should `true` be a string or a boolean? jsonlines is typed like JSON.

The entire reason I recommend jsonlines over CSV is because jsonlines has the readability of CSV while having the edge cases covered that otherwise leads to data corruption in CSV files (and believe me, I've head to deal with a lot of that over my extensive career!)

[hnick]

CSV is terrible, and I'd never write my own parser, but there are datasets where tab or pipe can never appear and just using @line = split(/|/, $data) or similar in another language is so convenient for quick and dirty scripting.

[hnlmorg]

Not just datasets where tab or pipe can never appear, but also that quotation marks aren't used and new lines can never appear (in CSV a row of data can legally span multiple lines because you're not supposed to escape char 12 (or '\n' as it appears in C-like documents).

I do get the convenience of CSV and I've used it loads in the past myself. But if ever you're dealing with data of which the contents of it you cannot be 100% sure of, it's safer to use a standard that has strict rules about how to parse control characters.

[hnick]

TSV/PSV generally don't allow newlines and commas/quotes are not special so are fine. Though Excel doesn't always play nice, but if you care about data integrity, you won't open it in Excel anyway.

[hnlmorg]

AFAIK TSV and PSV aren't specs, they're just an alternative delimiters for CSV. To that end most TSV and PSV parsers will be CSV parsers which match on a different byte ('\t' or '|' as opposed to ','). Which means if the parser follows spec (which not all do) then they will allow newlines and quotes too.

I'm not saying your use case is isn't appropriate though. eg if you're exporting from a DB who's records have already been sanitised and wanting to do some quick analysis then TSV/PSV is probably fine. But if you aren't dealing with sanitised data that doesn't contain \n, \" or others, then there is a good chance that your parser will handle them differently to your expectations -- and even a slim chance that your parser might just go ahead and slightly corrupt your data rather than warn you about differing column lengths et al. So it's definitely worth being aware that TSV and PSV suffer from all the same weaknesses as CSV.

[867-5309]

thanks for your reply, it was really informative. I'm not a fan of CSV so will delve deeper into jsonlines as an alternative next time it crops up

[th0ma5]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[hnlmorg]

That's the nice thing about jsonlines, it's not creating a new competing standard. It's just making better use of an existing standard (JSON).