[jtheory]

Side note: CSV is boring and unsexy as formats go; but it's also dead easy for companies to provide and even automate even with minimal technical staff on hand; this is one of the reasons I'm working with it at the moment ("CSV uploaded via SFTP" is on the list of inaterfaces we support for data integrations).

Think of the character escapes involved in something like XML or even JSON, for example; for CSV you escape only the double-quote, and you escape that by adding a second double quote -- so you don't need to mess with escaping your escape character. The main problem with CSV is more that there are several possible specs for it...

[IsTom]

There's only one RFC though.

[Roboprog]

RFC 4180: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

... which is compatible with the data I used to get out of Lotus-123 (and some other things) back in the 80s.

[jtheory]

Only one RFC... but that doesn't mean you can just reject all Excel-exported CSV as "invalid" and force those people to figure out some other solution. :(