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A columnar structure is definitely popular in the analytics community, although there are binary formats that are faster to scan again and can be mmap'd for zer

A columnar structure is definitely popular in the analytics community, although there are binary formats that are faster to scan again and can be mmap'd for zero-copy access. The fundamental problem with CSV is that it has no canonical form or formal construction. Even the RFC documents it by example and historical reference, rather than from first principles, and does so with liberal use of "maybe". Consequently being very easy to fling about as a human but much harder to reason about in the abstract, and this is most evident when you get bogged down in the gritty details of writing a CSV importer for your application.

scrollaway 5y ago
+1 - If you are looking for something JSON-compatible, JSON Lines (one json object per line - https://jsonlines.org/ https://jsonlines.org/) is pretty popular as well. You could store a CSV in JSONL very easily. In fact, jsonlines' website shows it as its first example: https://jsonlines.org/examples/ https://jsonlines.org/examples/ And if you wanted something that is json file-wide, you can just add some commas and wrap in [] for a list of rows.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Oh no, this is so similar to http://ndjson.org/ http://ndjson.org/
  - boygobbo 5y ago
    ndjson appears to be a fork of jsonlines with the addition of a spec (see https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson.github.io/issues/1 https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson.github.io/issues/1)
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  jsonlines (and ndjson too, since they're overlapping specs) is amazing. It's definitely the better way to convert between JSON and CSV. » ps aux | grep root | head -n5 | format jsonl ["root","87596","0.0","0.0","4359648","116","??","Ss","10:01am","0:00.02","com.apple.cmio.registerassistantservice"] ["root","81777","0.0","0.0","4321932","88","??","Ss","Wed12am","0:00.01","PlugInLibraryService"] ["root","71784","0.0","0.1","4365572","10504","??","Ss","Tue11pm","0:25.88","PerfPowerServices"] ["root","42906","0.0","0.0","4321572","88","??","Ss","Tue09am","0:00.01","com.apple.ColorSyncXPCAgent"] ["root","47415","0.0","0.0","4303172","88","??","Ss","Sat04am","0:00.01","aslmanager"] It has the readability of CSV but the stricter formatting of JSON. Win win.
- aae42 5y ago
  i've known about json lines for a bit (had to make a utility that parsed some output of a program that used jsonlines and was irritated it didn't use the json spec)... but for some reason just this post made me realize something... i've always been irritated by CSV log files (or space delimited), but would prefer something more structured like JSON, but JSON log files are pretty obnoxious for the reasons mentioned in the comments, a lot of data duplication... JSON lines for log files seems like a great fit, not sure why i didn't realize this until now, i suppose it was the context of the discussion!

scrollaway 5y ago

+1 - If you are looking for something JSON-compatible, JSON Lines (one json object per line - https://jsonlines.org/ https://jsonlines.org/) is pretty popular as well. You could store a CSV in JSONL very easily. In fact, jsonlines' website shows it as its first example: https://jsonlines.org/examples/ https://jsonlines.org/examples/ And if you wanted something that is json file-wide, you can just add some commas and wrap in [] for a list of rows.

DangitBobby 5y ago
Oh no, this is so similar to http://ndjson.org/ http://ndjson.org/
- boygobbo 5y ago
  ndjson appears to be a fork of jsonlines with the addition of a spec (see https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson.github.io/issues/1 https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson.github.io/issues/1)
hnlmorg 5y ago
jsonlines (and ndjson too, since they're overlapping specs) is amazing. It's definitely the better way to convert between JSON and CSV. » ps aux | grep root | head -n5 | format jsonl ["root","87596","0.0","0.0","4359648","116","??","Ss","10:01am","0:00.02","com.apple.cmio.registerassistantservice"] ["root","81777","0.0","0.0","4321932","88","??","Ss","Wed12am","0:00.01","PlugInLibraryService"] ["root","71784","0.0","0.1","4365572","10504","??","Ss","Tue11pm","0:25.88","PerfPowerServices"] ["root","42906","0.0","0.0","4321572","88","??","Ss","Tue09am","0:00.01","com.apple.ColorSyncXPCAgent"] ["root","47415","0.0","0.0","4303172","88","??","Ss","Sat04am","0:00.01","aslmanager"] It has the readability of CSV but the stricter formatting of JSON. Win win.
aae42 5y ago
i've known about json lines for a bit (had to make a utility that parsed some output of a program that used jsonlines and was irritated it didn't use the json spec)... but for some reason just this post made me realize something... i've always been irritated by CSV log files (or space delimited), but would prefer something more structured like JSON, but JSON log files are pretty obnoxious for the reasons mentioned in the comments, a lot of data duplication... JSON lines for log files seems like a great fit, not sure why i didn't realize this until now, i suppose it was the context of the discussion!