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if you start going down that route you will have to specify the format for dates, network addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers... it never ends

• tinus_hn 6y ago
  Either you accept that CSV can’t reliably contain fractional numbers or you specify the decimal separator.
  • brazzy 6y ago
    CSV doesn't contain numbers at all; it contains strings. How those should be parsed into numbers is not part of the format, unless by CSV you additionally mean "to be imported by Excel". Which is certainly a common use case but not always the case.
    • tinus_hn 6y ago
      By this line of thinking, any file type is specified, because the specification of a file is a sequence of bytes. Arguably right, practically useless.
      • brazzy 6y ago
        The distinction between file format and payload format is perfectly normal and not at all useless. All file formats have limits for how much they define types for the payload. Most have very limited types. JSON for example knows objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null. It's not that big a difference to have a format that has only strings.