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> In fact the first falsehood programmers believe about CSVs is that it's a good serialisation, interchange (between separate systems) or human-edition format.
by xienze 9y ago
> In fact the first falsehood programmers believe about CSVs is that it's a good serialisation, interchange (between separate systems) or human-edition format.
I would argue that most programmers realize CSV sucks and would rather use something structured and sane. In my experience CSV support almost always comes about because someone from another business unit (e.g., marketing) needs self-service import facilities. Those folks live in Excel and CSV becomes the de facto import format.
- masklinn 9y ago> Those folks live in Excel and CSV becomes the de facto import format. Which is an error, and you'd save yourself much pain if you just worked directly with excel files. Most languages have libraries allowing that.
- paulryanrogers 9y agoIME none works exactly like Excel and therefore will inevitably fail as users push more and more of it's edges and bugs on the system
- tinus_hn 9y agoCsv files don’t work like excel either. Typically all you need is a table with headings and then text and number fields.
- paulryanrogers 9y agoCSV is simpler and therefore harder for Excel to screw up. Not for lack of trying: exponential values often truncated, Windows 1252 encoding, BOM, etc.
- emodendroket 9y agoHeaven help you if whatever you're working in doesn't, though.
- majewsky 9y agoThen you make a wrapper program in a language that has an Excel library which e.g. takes your own data in some structured format (JSON, YAML, or whatever) and emits Excel.