4 ms·
"ID;P" is valid at the start of CSV as well. Fields are allowed to contain semicolons.
by philh 10y ago
"ID;P" is valid at the start of CSV as well. Fields are allowed to contain semicolons.
- Frank2312 10y agoDepending on locale. I believe in the Canadian French locale (and maybe many other locales), ";" is considered a separator (a "," equivalent).
- philh 10y agoSure, but mhd was saying that if we stuck to CSV being actually comma-separated, "ID;P" would distinguish CSV from SYLK. I'm saying that it wouldn't.
- Someone 10y agomhd doesn't say that: Thus 'ID;P' would be a valid header for SYLK and e.g. for German "CSV"s.
- philh 10y ago"If CSV would stick to commas ... then even such overly simple heuristics would've sufficed, wouldn't it?"
- Someone 10y agoAh, thanks. Apparently, mhd knew and forgot :-) The problem of discriminating between csv and SYLK files is unsolvable, as every file with only ASCII characters and no commas or quotes is a valid csv file (with one column) and there are valid SYLK files in that set.
- ufmace 10y agoIn the general sense, yeah, but you would think it shouldn't be too hard to make a reasonable guess about which one it is and handle failures gracefully instead of assuming that it's SYLK based on a tiny amount of data and then blowing up when it turns out not to be.
- mark-r 10y agoValid, but not nearly as likely to run into by accident.