4 ms·
> Off the top of my head, you need to specify text encoding, line endings, a quoting mechanism in case a field contains the separator, and an escaping mechanism
by Denvercoder9 6y ago
> Off the top of my head, you need to specify text encoding, line endings, a quoting mechanism in case a field contains the separator, and an escaping mechanism in case a field contains multiple lines or the quote character.
You also need to specify the separator itself, which despite the name isn't always a comma, but can also be a semicolon or (less commonly) a tab.
- medstrom 6y agoThe IANA standard for TSV files [1] bans tab characters inside of fields. It's a convenient assumption, so if I'm writing a quick way to sync some data to disk, I choose TSV because the functions can be simpler. https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separated-values https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa...
- mFixman 6y agoTo this day I don't understand why standard table formats don't use the standard ASCII unit and record separators. They are there, they are convenient, and they don't require any visible character sacrifices.
- marcthe12 6y agoI gues lack of program support. But yeas. That would have been great