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As someone from one of those countries I've never understood this criticism of CSV. JSON doesn't let you choose your own separator either but no one levels this
by _dps 8y ago
As someone from one of those countries I've never understood this criticism of CSV. JSON doesn't let you choose your own separator either but no one levels this complaint at it. Defensively quoting values that may contain commas is easy, and nearly always a negligible cost. This really seems like a total non-issue to me and I've never understood how it has gained so much mindshare among CSV critics.
- CodesInChaos 8y agoThe problem is Excel's horrible CSV implementation, and opening the file in Excel is one of the main applications of CSV. The German version of Excel expects semicolon separated CSV, where comma serves are decimal point and the date format must also be German. I found no way to create a CSV file that opens in Excel, regardless of locale. (And there are a million other problems in Excel's CSV implementation)