3 ms·
As the author of a CSV munging tool (CSVfix) I think most of the problems with CSV could be fixed if people producing CSV output, and people reading CSV input o
by zabzonk 5y ago
As the author of a CSV munging tool (CSVfix) I think most of the problems with CSV could be fixed if people producing CSV output, and people reading CSV input obeyed the rules of the RFC. Sadly, most people don't, and any textual output or input is routinely described as CSV, when it is nothing of the sort - even to the extent of not being comma-separated!
- masklinn 5y ago> Sadly, most people don't And the important think to remember is that you can not and will not make them.
- zabzonk 5y agoNo, but you could possibly suggest to them that what they are producing is not CSV. Otherwise, any sort of description becomes meaningless.
- javajosh 5y agoIs there something like CSVlint? Would be useful particular in the output stage, a kind of functional runtime test to make sure your program's output is valid and consumable.
- zabzonk 5y agoValidating CSV syntax is kind of hard - in the worst case you would have to read the entire CSV file.
- hermitcrab 5y agoEven then it seems that there aren't that many checks you can do, other than: -warning if different rows have different numbers of columns -warning if the file ends without closing escaping Without meta data you can't check data types. A missing escape character might result in a valid CSV (just not the one intended).
- pessimizer 5y agoIf you're referring to http://csvfix.byethost5.com/csvfix15/csvfix.html http://csvfix.byethost5.com/csvfix15/csvfix.html, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You were my pick for best tool for dealing with CSVs when a bunch of others (some of which sadly ended up with better adoption) were competing for the prize.
- zabzonk 5y agoYep, that's me. I'm afraid, because of mental and physical health problems, and family troubles I have stopped supporting it. Also, when bitbucket stopped supporting Mercurial I simply could not be arsed porting it to git. Not that I have anything against git.
- hermitcrab 5y agoI have a commercial question for you about CSVfix (yes, I know it is no longer maintained). Email me if interested (see bio for email).