3 ms·

It doesn't so much as it says here are some things that people have done. > While there are various specifications and implementations for the CSV format (f

It doesn't so much as it says here are some things that people have done. > While there are various specifications and implementations for the CSV format (for ex. [4], [5], [6] and [7]), there is no formal specification in existence, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations of CSV files. This section documents the format that seems to be followed by most implementations:

VLM 10y ago
RFC4180 misses some rather famous practical problems, such as until very recently Excel was limited to some 16 bit number of rows, 32767 or 65536, and the bigger and richer the corporation the less likely their software is updated, so you send them a 500K line CSV dump of engineering data, they use Excel as a viewer, and they insta-file a bug report that they are paying good money for 500K lines of data but they checked and we only sent them the first 65536 lines or whatever. Bonus fun if they save the truncated file on itself permanently deleting the excess data. Or if their corporate standard DBMS is Excel, as it often is at larger companies. This has been fixed, but only in very recent versions of Excel, where I work this was a near daily issue until last year or two.
- greggyb 10y ago
  > This has been fixed, but only in very recent versions of Excel, where I work this was a near daily issue until last year or two. This has been fixed since Excel 2007. I don't know whether 9 years counts as very recently. I also agree with the fact that it has been an issue. Even at customers who have upgraded past Office 2007, a lot of corporate forms and standardized data exports are based on old work that was completed before the new Office file formats. Updates to these documents and exports continue to use the old file formats because people make changes to existing artifacts, which are handled in compatibility mode in Office, and no one changes the settings to export .xlsx files.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    2007 is still in the future for some enterprise companies.
    - greggyb 10y ago
      Absolutely. I am not denying enterprise inertia. But the parent of my original comment specifically said "recent versions of Excel". To me, this sounds like "a version of Excel released recently", not "a version of Excel that certain enterprise clients have only recently started migrating to".

VLM 10y ago

RFC4180 misses some rather famous practical problems, such as until very recently Excel was limited to some 16 bit number of rows, 32767 or 65536, and the bigger and richer the corporation the less likely their software is updated, so you send them a 500K line CSV dump of engineering data, they use Excel as a viewer, and they insta-file a bug report that they are paying good money for 500K lines of data but they checked and we only sent them the first 65536 lines or whatever. Bonus fun if they save the truncated file on itself permanently deleting the excess data. Or if their corporate standard DBMS is Excel, as it often is at larger companies. This has been fixed, but only in very recent versions of Excel, where I work this was a near daily issue until last year or two.

greggyb 10y ago
> This has been fixed, but only in very recent versions of Excel, where I work this was a near daily issue until last year or two. This has been fixed since Excel 2007. I don't know whether 9 years counts as very recently. I also agree with the fact that it has been an issue. Even at customers who have upgraded past Office 2007, a lot of corporate forms and standardized data exports are based on old work that was completed before the new Office file formats. Updates to these documents and exports continue to use the old file formats because people make changes to existing artifacts, which are handled in compatibility mode in Office, and no one changes the settings to export .xlsx files.
- astrodust 10y ago
  2007 is still in the future for some enterprise companies.
  - greggyb 10y ago
    Absolutely. I am not denying enterprise inertia. But the parent of my original comment specifically said "recent versions of Excel". To me, this sounds like "a version of Excel released recently", not "a version of Excel that certain enterprise clients have only recently started migrating to".