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by akira2501 805 days ago
What if my data contains a new line? People focus on the comma then forget the newline is just as significant. That still needs to be escaped and we're right back where we started.

Meanwhile, RFC4180 takes less time to read than this entire article.
2 comments
paulfitz 805 days ago
Escaping is needed no matter what separators are used, but if a character from the astral plane is always present (like U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO) then you can be pretty sure the software is handling unicode well and isn't corrupting cells without you noticing.

So true about RFC4180. Admittedly this post kind of got out a little early, support for the format was slated for the first of next month...

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blackbeans 804 days ago
Ageeed, and the RFC4180 you are referring to also specifies how to escape newlines.

CSV is a simple storage format for data. Its simplicity, readability and portability makes it popular. I think that any attempt to improve it will be a failure.

I must say that CSV generally suffices for table data. The only annoyance is that internationally, there are differences in the use of the column separator, as the comma is often used as decimal separator. I think CSV should always be implemented with a comma as column separator and a dot as decimal separator, regardless of the country. But applications such as Excel do not accept this format internationally.

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