[josephg]

> to get Excel to correctly load a UTF8 encoded CSV or similar you must include the BOM

Ah so that’s the trick! I’ve run into this problem a bunch of times in the wild, where some script emits csv which works on the developers machine but fails strangely with real world data.

Good to know there’s a simple solution. I hope I remember your comment next time I see this!

[silon42]

Excel CSV is broken anyway, since in some (EU, ...) countries it needs ; as separator.

[OptionOfT]

That's not an excel issue. That's a locale issue.

Due to (parts of?) the EU using then comma as the decimal separator, you have to use another symbol to separate your values.

[dspillett]

Comma for decimal separator, and point (or sometimes 'postraphy) for thousands separator if there is one, is very common. IIRC more European countries use that than don't, officially, and a bunch of countries outside Europe do too.

It wouldn't normally necessitate not using comma as the field separator in CSV files though, wrapping those values is quotes is how that would usually be handled in my experience.

Though many people end up switching to “our way”, despite their normal locale preferences, because of compatibility issues they encounter otherwise with US/UK software written naively.

[anthk]

Locales should have died long ago. You use plain data, stop parsing it depdending on wen your live. Plan9/9front uses where right long ago. Just use Unicode everywhere, use context-free units for money.

[dspillett]

Locales are fine for display, but yes they should not affect what goes into files for transfer. There have always been appropriate control characters in the common character sets, in ASCII and most 8-bit codepages there are non-printing control characters that have suitable meanings to be used in place of commas and EOL so they could be used unescaped in data fields. Numbers could be plain, perhaps with the dot still as a standard decimal point or we could store non-integers as a pair of ints (value and scale), dates in an unambiguous format (something like one of the options from ISO8601), etc.

Unfortunately people like CSV to be at least part way human-readable, which means readable delimiters, end-or-record markers being EOLs that a text editor would understand, and the decimal/thousand/currency symbols & date formatting that they are used to.

[dspillett]

A lot of the time when people say CSV they mean “character separated values” rather than specifically “comma separated values”.

In the text files we get from clients we sometimes see tab used instead of comma, or pipe. I don't think we've seen semicolon yet, though our standard file interpreter would quietly cope¹ as long as there is nothing really odd in the header row.

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[1] it uses the heuristic “the most common non-alpha-numeric non-space non-quote character found in the header row” to detect the separator used if it isn't explicitly told what to expect