[kimagure]

Maybe it's a naive question, but why shouldn't you use quotes to encapsulate things that are meant to be text so that you can catch things like white space?

Also that do people use formats other than comma and tab delimited?

My own experience with CSV is dealing with my own data and instrument readouts (which are mostly always tab delimited with a header section) so I don't know.

[itafroma]

Where did you read that you shouldn't use quotes to encapsulate text? RFC 4180 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180) says you may.

Many CSV generators and CSV parsers don't conform to RFC 4180, however, but if you're planning on transmitting data using CSV, it's simple enough to say "use an RFC 4180-compliant parser."

[kimagure]

yeah, i was just wondering why the author kind of explicitly recommended against using white space when most parsers (including MS excel in my experience) handle white space encapsulated in quotes just fine

[itafroma]

That's for variable names, not run-of-the-mill text. Variable names (and, in certain situations, dictionary keys) generally can't have spaces, so if you're generating code off of the data set, having to generate variable names (or dictionary keys) without spaces is an additional step.