[justinator]

From what I understand, you're basically right, but you're basically right only in a sense that that's what most people do. There's no "CSV Data Format" spec. It's all just what most people agree on, most of the time. Unless someone has another idea.

[steveklabnik]

text/csv is defined in RFC 4180: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

[nemetroid]

Strictly, the definition in RFC 4180 mandates ASCII which makes it unusable for many purposes. I guess there's nothing practical stopping you from using another encoding though.

[steveklabnik]

  >      Common usage of CSV is US-ASCII, but other character sets defined
  >      by IANA for the "text" tree may be used in conjunction with the
  >      "charset" parameter.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6657.txt

https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-se...