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But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those c

But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those can include support for ASCII separators?

beaconstudios 6y ago
Developers rarely use notepad. Non technical users still have to edit csvs by hand, all over the world.
JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
I don't think your first line is at all true. Modifying Csvs with notepad is rife. I'd wager more than using any one particular code editor.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Or they use Excel, which can introduce its own entertaining errors. A few years back while working on something that unavoidably used large quantities of CSV data we would sternly warn people not to use Excel, but people still did it ("But I just looked at it!").
roto 6y ago
Developers are by no means the only humans that use and/or edit CSV files.
the_angry_angel 6y ago
> But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those can include support for ASCII separators? I do a fair amount of work with companies that do "EDI" over CSV (or worse CSV-like - think 2 CSVs jammed together with different formats, no headers, no support for escaping or quoting) and fixed width documents. I can absolutely assure you that humans do open these files in notepad far more often than I'd like. Often one of the main reasons they don't use things like X12, ASCII separators, etc. is because a "human needs to open it at some point" was a prevailing business decision some number of years ago (think "what happens if the IT system fails? how can we still ship stuff even in a complete emergency") and now it's baked into their documented process so deeply its like shouting into the wind to alter things. Third party warehouses are the worst at this.
sfifs 6y ago
Let's say we have a product master. Something looks fishy and we want a brand person or product supply person to check... Push a CSV and it's trivially easy for them to open in XL and check, make corrections and send. In a business context, this happens far more often than you may expect. Sure you can build a custom platform to validate and make people connect to a form connecting to a database - but Excel is a great user interface and everyone knows excel. A funny incident - we were struggling to build a complex workflow in KNIME where at some points we need user input. Nothing out of the box was great - tools either assume a dashboard paradigm or a data flow paradigm - nothing In between. One of our creative folks came up with the solution of writing to a CSV and getting KNIME to open it in excel. The user would make changes and save, close excel and continue the workflow in KNIME. Even completely non technical people got it.
- SifJar 6y ago
  but if using the ASCII separators was common, excel would support that and it seems like this workflow would be unaffected?
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    People still need to open them in non-excel apps. And the format may predate widespread use of spreadsheet software. Fun fact, Excel will truncate numbers beyond 15 digits unless prefixed with a single quote mark.
- hnick 6y ago
  We had to ban our non-technical users from opening CSVs in Excel because it would strip leading zeros and do other exciting things like convert large numbers to 1.23123E+20 :( It does this without any notification or warning when you save.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    Excel can only display CSV files. I had to ban myself from editing files in Excel because it’s atrocious at it. It also likes to somewhat change decimal-seperators (again, without any warning).
C1sc0cat 6y ago
The average CSV use is as an export/import from excel and most of those users don't have specialised developer editors.
kube-system 6y ago
I have not seen very many business analysts open an IDE. In my experience, most edit CSVs in Excel.

beaconstudios 6y ago

Developers rarely use notepad. Non technical users still have to edit csvs by hand, all over the world.

JauntyHatAngle 6y ago

I don't think your first line is at all true. Modifying Csvs with notepad is rife. I'd wager more than using any one particular code editor.

arethuza 6y ago
Or they use Excel, which can introduce its own entertaining errors. A few years back while working on something that unavoidably used large quantities of CSV data we would sternly warn people not to use Excel, but people still did it ("But I just looked at it!").

roto 6y ago

Developers are by no means the only humans that use and/or edit CSV files.

the_angry_angel 6y ago

> But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those can include support for ASCII separators? I do a fair amount of work with companies that do "EDI" over CSV (or worse CSV-like - think 2 CSVs jammed together with different formats, no headers, no support for escaping or quoting) and fixed width documents. I can absolutely assure you that humans do open these files in notepad far more often than I'd like. Often one of the main reasons they don't use things like X12, ASCII separators, etc. is because a "human needs to open it at some point" was a prevailing business decision some number of years ago (think "what happens if the IT system fails? how can we still ship stuff even in a complete emergency") and now it's baked into their documented process so deeply its like shouting into the wind to alter things. Third party warehouses are the worst at this.

sfifs 6y ago

Let's say we have a product master. Something looks fishy and we want a brand person or product supply person to check... Push a CSV and it's trivially easy for them to open in XL and check, make corrections and send. In a business context, this happens far more often than you may expect. Sure you can build a custom platform to validate and make people connect to a form connecting to a database - but Excel is a great user interface and everyone knows excel. A funny incident - we were struggling to build a complex workflow in KNIME where at some points we need user input. Nothing out of the box was great - tools either assume a dashboard paradigm or a data flow paradigm - nothing In between. One of our creative folks came up with the solution of writing to a CSV and getting KNIME to open it in excel. The user would make changes and save, close excel and continue the workflow in KNIME. Even completely non technical people got it.

SifJar 6y ago
but if using the ASCII separators was common, excel would support that and it seems like this workflow would be unaffected?
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  People still need to open them in non-excel apps. And the format may predate widespread use of spreadsheet software. Fun fact, Excel will truncate numbers beyond 15 digits unless prefixed with a single quote mark.
hnick 6y ago
We had to ban our non-technical users from opening CSVs in Excel because it would strip leading zeros and do other exciting things like convert large numbers to 1.23123E+20 :( It does this without any notification or warning when you save.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  Excel can only display CSV files. I had to ban myself from editing files in Excel because it’s atrocious at it. It also likes to somewhat change decimal-seperators (again, without any warning).

C1sc0cat 6y ago

The average CSV use is as an export/import from excel and most of those users don't have specialised developer editors.

kube-system 6y ago

I have not seen very many business analysts open an IDE. In my experience, most edit CSVs in Excel.