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Excel is mostly responsible for wrecking any attempt of "standard" CSV, not that there ever was a chance. If I remember correctly, non-Anglo CSVs using a semi-

• rusk 7y ago
  Its not just non-Anglo .. semicolon is often used because data often contains commas, and it’s just easier to swop your delimiter than encapsulate your fields properly ... even then it’s just a simple matter to use the alternative delimeter, or convert by a simple search and replace (once youve added encapuslation to the relevant fields of course). Though CSV directly implies commas I find it helpful to consider it a synonym for “delimited text”. The specifics of the delimiter don’t bother me so much so long as the format is consistent.
  • mhd 7y ago
    Not saying it's not useful, just that this arose from them not using a hard-coded comma, but referencing some default separator, that happens to be the semi-colon in some locales. I might be wrong and this could have an older precedent. Now, whether it would've been better to stick with the comma and just properly quote all the values for locales where the comma is a decimal separator and thus often used in spreadsheet columns is a moot point, the damage has been done. Personally I just call it "character separated values" anyway. I quite like tab-separated values. Makes it okay to read quite often and I think it's the default output of Postgres' COPY command.