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Network effect: Database upload/export, spreadsheets, etc... I used to hate them too until I realized how ubiquitous and well supported they are. comma vs. tab
by dorfsmay 11y ago
Network effect: Database upload/export, spreadsheets, etc... I used to hate them too until I realized how ubiquitous and well supported they are.
comma vs. tab: It doesn't matter, in the end, you have to use a character to separate fields, and if you are going to use a "normal" character, there are chances that it might appear in your text, so you have to either escape that character, or quote your text, which csv does in a fairly standard way, so comma vs tab doesn't really matter.
- infecto 11y ago+1 I always found it best practice to quote text. Makes the debate a moot point.
- username223 11y ago> ... if you are going to use a "normal" character, ... It's a shame that the ASCII file, group, record, and unit separators that have been around since forever did not catch on.
- Rotten194 11y agoMostly because they aren't user-inputtable. Yes you can't realistically hand-edit a 3gb .csv either, but csvs don't usually start out that large.
- username223 11y agoI was going to add a sentence to my comment... They were easy to input via control-caret, etc., until various programs repurposed those combinations. I think a bigger problem is that there is no standard way to display them. (BTW, if inputtability mattered at all, Unicode wouldn't exist. ;-)
- e12e 11y agoI'm not sure what you mean by your last sentence. Sure, you might have to work a bit to be able to change your locale to Klingon, and input that -- but for something for which unicode is actually useful, like Japanese, there's been input solutions for a long time (predating unicode, as you need a wide character set for such languages). And unicode is of course easy to use with "less exotic" languages like Norwegian that can't be represented in basic 127-bit ascii -- via a simple keyboard map.