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This comes up every single time someone mentions CSV. Without fail. The bottom line is that CSV is human readable and writable in plain text. If you start using

This comes up every single time someone mentions CSV. Without fail. The bottom line is that CSV is human readable and writable in plain text. If you start using fancy ASCII characters, then it becomes neither because our text editors don't support it.

paulie_a 9y ago
Honestly I dispute that it is "human readable". It is sort of legible but incredibly inconvenient to read or manually write. They might be slightly more convenient than tabular files such as ACH or DDF
- paulddraper 9y ago
  More convenient than JSON, more consistent than YAML.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Consistent? What do you mean, "consistent"? Sometimes it's comma separated, sometimes it's semicolon separated (depending on the user's locale), sometimes it's separated by tabs (because it's a _C_SV file, yeah, no biggie), no content encoding hint (Unicode? Latin-1251? Win-1252? Nobody knows), not to mention you've written this comment under an article that shows just about the least consistent behavior ever. (Line breaks? Ahahahaha!) The only consistent thing about CSV is its ubiquity; other than that, it's a hairy, inconsistent mess that appears simple. (Source: having parsed millions of blobs that all identified themselves as CSV, despite being almost completely different in structure.)
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      > Sometimes it's comma separated, sometimes it's semicolon separated (depending on the user's locale), sometimes it's separated by tabs CSV is comma separated. [1] Valid YAML foo: bar baz Invalid YAML foo: "bar" baz Valid YAML foo: "bar baz" Invalid YAML foo: "bar baz Valid YAML foo: bar baz" [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180
      - efreak 9y ago
        You would think so, but people are dumb. I've seen tab-delimited files that are .CSV instead of .tsv, and I've also seen the semicolon delimiter a few times though I can't recall where. I think Excel actually pops up a prompt when importing to confirm the delimiter in some cases? From your link, it's quite clear that you should not assume any particular CSV file to follow any particular rules. > Interoperability considerations: > Due to lack of a single specification, there are considerable differences among implementations. Implementors should "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (RFC 793 [8]) when processing CSV files. An attempt at a common definition can be found in Section 2.... > Published specification: > While numerous private specifications exist for various programs and systems, there is no single "master" specification for this format. An attempt at a common definition can be found in Section 2. Section 2 states: > This section documents the format that seems to be followed by most implementations:
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        "All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green." -Goethe If CSV were indeed always comma-separated, my hair would be at least 5% less gray. Alas, most programs emit semicolon-separated "CSV" in some locales (MS Office, LibreOffice, you-name-it-they-got-it). Of course, I understand that your academic position "if it chokes the RFC-compliant parser, it's not a True CSV and should be sent to /dev/null" tautologically exists - but for some reason, users tend to object to such treatment (especially when they have no useful tools that would emit your One True Format for them). TL;DR: there is no single standard fitting all the things that call themselves "CSV".
    - nur0n 9y ago
      You seem like the perfect person to ask: what is a format that is close to the (apparent)simplicity of CSV, but is actually consistent?
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        I am so sorry. In other words, as soon as you start exchanging data, you'll get something that is complex, broken, or (most common case) both. Existence of a simple, consistent general format has not been conclusively proven impossible, but I have yet to see one in practice. (Of course, everybody and their dog have cooked up simple data schemes, yes, but those are a) domain-specific, and b) not in widespread use.)
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Let's send patches to text editors so they render fancy ASCII characters? I also find it amusing that "fancy ASCII characters" is even a statement that can make sense, there's only 127 ASCII characters!
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  This might solve the "readable" part of the problem, but not the "writable" part of the problem.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Explain to me why humans have to be the ones to write proper syntax and escaping, instead of their editors. Do you do this for other formats, like RTF? What is this obsession with hand-coding complicated formats :)
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > Do you do this for other formats, like RTF? No, but I do it for formats like HTML, CSS, JSON. My editor can assist me, but I don't need it. To a lesser degree, the same is true of Java, though I do admit to leaning much more heavily on my IDE for that. > What is this obsession with hand-coding complicated formats :) Well, part of it is that they're not all that complicated unless you're doing something fancy. Another part is almost certainly our (we as in developers) pride in being able to use nothing but vi installed on a decade-old operating system to get things done.
      - EGreg 9y ago
        Why? What benefit do you get from coding it by hand? The only one I can think of is being able to type some esoteric incantations in a textbox. Downsides include: XSS and malicious injection - users should be using markdown or provided an actual contentEditable HTML editor instead of a textarea. Like in GMail. Syntax errors. How many times have you typed some JSON by hand and realized you forgot to balance some braces or add a comma, or remove a comma at the end of an object? Complexity not that complicated, really? Basic C, HTML, CSS is not complicated. Advanced stuff is complicated. Forgetting a brace or a semicolon torpedoes the whole document. SQL is not complicated. Does that mean you want to write SQL by hand for production code? Why don't you install a simple extension to vi like an html format adapter? I'm a developer too. But let me tell you what it sounds like when you say you want to use nothing but vi: that's like saying you want to be able to build robots using nothing but a hammer and some nails, and nothing else can be built that requires further abstraction or advancement where you can't do the same with a hammer. And also keep in mind that not everyone is a developer. The fact that you like to keep esoteric syntax rules in your head for HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, C++ and so on doesn't mean EVERYONE should have to. When it comes to CSV, it's not even a real standard. You have to keep in your head all the cross platform quirks, like \r\n garbage similar to how web developers need to keep in their head all te Browser quirks and workarounds. All this... for some pride thing of being able to write text based stuff by hand. I brought up RTF for a reason. No sane person should want to type .rtf or .docx by hand. So why HTML?

paulie_a 9y ago

Honestly I dispute that it is "human readable". It is sort of legible but incredibly inconvenient to read or manually write. They might be slightly more convenient than tabular files such as ACH or DDF

paulddraper 9y ago
More convenient than JSON, more consistent than YAML.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Consistent? What do you mean, "consistent"? Sometimes it's comma separated, sometimes it's semicolon separated (depending on the user's locale), sometimes it's separated by tabs (because it's a _C_SV file, yeah, no biggie), no content encoding hint (Unicode? Latin-1251? Win-1252? Nobody knows), not to mention you've written this comment under an article that shows just about the least consistent behavior ever. (Line breaks? Ahahahaha!) The only consistent thing about CSV is its ubiquity; other than that, it's a hairy, inconsistent mess that appears simple. (Source: having parsed millions of blobs that all identified themselves as CSV, despite being almost completely different in structure.)
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    > Sometimes it's comma separated, sometimes it's semicolon separated (depending on the user's locale), sometimes it's separated by tabs CSV is comma separated. [1] Valid YAML foo: bar baz Invalid YAML foo: "bar" baz Valid YAML foo: "bar baz" Invalid YAML foo: "bar baz Valid YAML foo: bar baz" [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180
    - efreak 9y ago
      You would think so, but people are dumb. I've seen tab-delimited files that are .CSV instead of .tsv, and I've also seen the semicolon delimiter a few times though I can't recall where. I think Excel actually pops up a prompt when importing to confirm the delimiter in some cases? From your link, it's quite clear that you should not assume any particular CSV file to follow any particular rules. > Interoperability considerations: > Due to lack of a single specification, there are considerable differences among implementations. Implementors should "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (RFC 793 [8]) when processing CSV files. An attempt at a common definition can be found in Section 2.... > Published specification: > While numerous private specifications exist for various programs and systems, there is no single "master" specification for this format. An attempt at a common definition can be found in Section 2. Section 2 states: > This section documents the format that seems to be followed by most implementations:
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      "All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green." -Goethe If CSV were indeed always comma-separated, my hair would be at least 5% less gray. Alas, most programs emit semicolon-separated "CSV" in some locales (MS Office, LibreOffice, you-name-it-they-got-it). Of course, I understand that your academic position "if it chokes the RFC-compliant parser, it's not a True CSV and should be sent to /dev/null" tautologically exists - but for some reason, users tend to object to such treatment (especially when they have no useful tools that would emit your One True Format for them). TL;DR: there is no single standard fitting all the things that call themselves "CSV".
  - nur0n 9y ago
    You seem like the perfect person to ask: what is a format that is close to the (apparent)simplicity of CSV, but is actually consistent?
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      I am so sorry. In other words, as soon as you start exchanging data, you'll get something that is complex, broken, or (most common case) both. Existence of a simple, consistent general format has not been conclusively proven impossible, but I have yet to see one in practice. (Of course, everybody and their dog have cooked up simple data schemes, yes, but those are a) domain-specific, and b) not in widespread use.)

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Let's send patches to text editors so they render fancy ASCII characters? I also find it amusing that "fancy ASCII characters" is even a statement that can make sense, there's only 127 ASCII characters!

pavel_lishin 9y ago
This might solve the "readable" part of the problem, but not the "writable" part of the problem.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Explain to me why humans have to be the ones to write proper syntax and escaping, instead of their editors. Do you do this for other formats, like RTF? What is this obsession with hand-coding complicated formats :)
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Do you do this for other formats, like RTF? No, but I do it for formats like HTML, CSS, JSON. My editor can assist me, but I don't need it. To a lesser degree, the same is true of Java, though I do admit to leaning much more heavily on my IDE for that. > What is this obsession with hand-coding complicated formats :) Well, part of it is that they're not all that complicated unless you're doing something fancy. Another part is almost certainly our (we as in developers) pride in being able to use nothing but vi installed on a decade-old operating system to get things done.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      Why? What benefit do you get from coding it by hand? The only one I can think of is being able to type some esoteric incantations in a textbox. Downsides include: XSS and malicious injection - users should be using markdown or provided an actual contentEditable HTML editor instead of a textarea. Like in GMail. Syntax errors. How many times have you typed some JSON by hand and realized you forgot to balance some braces or add a comma, or remove a comma at the end of an object? Complexity not that complicated, really? Basic C, HTML, CSS is not complicated. Advanced stuff is complicated. Forgetting a brace or a semicolon torpedoes the whole document. SQL is not complicated. Does that mean you want to write SQL by hand for production code? Why don't you install a simple extension to vi like an html format adapter? I'm a developer too. But let me tell you what it sounds like when you say you want to use nothing but vi: that's like saying you want to be able to build robots using nothing but a hammer and some nails, and nothing else can be built that requires further abstraction or advancement where you can't do the same with a hammer. And also keep in mind that not everyone is a developer. The fact that you like to keep esoteric syntax rules in your head for HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, C++ and so on doesn't mean EVERYONE should have to. When it comes to CSV, it's not even a real standard. You have to keep in your head all the cross platform quirks, like \r\n garbage similar to how web developers need to keep in their head all te Browser quirks and workarounds. All this... for some pride thing of being able to write text based stuff by hand. I brought up RTF for a reason. No sane person should want to type .rtf or .docx by hand. So why HTML?