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I saw a problem recently where a file had a .csv extension but was actually colon delimited. The data contained fields with large quantities of text so a CSV pa

• dspillett 6y ago
  One of our clients internally uses an odd text file format with ~ as the field delimiter and a fixed-width based header & footer containing metadata. And still sometimes send such files with names ending .csv. ~ is a better choice for field separator though, it is far less commonly used in most datasets and natural languages. | can also make sense for the same reason, and visually looks like a column divider as an extra bonus.
• Pamar 6y ago
  This is a common problem when you receive csv from someone working in a different country: comma is a decimal separator in some cases (e.g.: Germany) so Excel will automatically switch to semicolon for separators. So now your colleague in the UK office (or even someone who simply prefers using Windows in with US locale, or, as in my case, got a UK laptop because the German keyboards has some layout differences to what they consider "normal"...) double clicks on the "German" .csv... Excel will show (most of the time) every line as a single FIELD. So you have to close it and use Data Import. We just moved to the latest version of Office 365 at the job and it still works like this (even if the import action can usually figure out that semicolon is the separator without me having to manually specify it...).