Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by re 287 days ago
As soon as you encounter any CSVs where field values may contain double quotes, commas, or newlines, you need tooling to work with CSV as well.

(TSV FTW)

3 comments

TSV is superior to CSVs, and it still angers me that Excel doesn't offer it as a standard input option, but your examples are fairly easily handled by eye in a text file.

Tools definitely make it faster and more reliable.

One of my first tasks as a junior dev was replacing an incorrect/incomplete "roll your own" CSV parsing regex (which broke in production) with a library.
ASCII FS GS RS US ... just make decent font entries for them.
And keys on the keyboard.
Yes! But nobody ever came up with decent font entries that would look snappy on keys. Not even IBM (or Data General or Burroughs or whoever) I guess.