5 ms·
Of course there is a old solution in the ANSI character set. File, Record, Group and Unit separator characters
by wombatpm 5y ago
Of course there is a old solution in the ANSI character set. File, Record, Group and Unit separator characters
- cbsmith 5y agoYup. I mean, if you're going to go with a text encoding, you might want to, you know, use the features of the text encoding that were put there explicitly for said purpose... ...or you could invent abominations like CSV, TSV, etc. ;-)
- hermitcrab 5y agoYes. You could get a long way with a text format in which: -the first line is always a header -fields are separated by Unit separator characters -records are separated by Record separator characters -encoding is UTF8 If you wanted to get fancy you could also have: -comment lines -column metadata (e.g. column 0 is an ISO date, column 2 is text, column 3 is an integer) Both the above could start with a Unicode character unlikely to be used for anything else. I think that would avoid 99% of the pain of CSV files. The downside is that the use of things like the Unit separator mean that it wouldn't be easy to create/edit manually. I don't suppose it will ever happen though.
- cbsmith 5y ago> it wouldn't be easy to create/edit manually I mean, you'd have to be using a pretty terrible tool for it not being able to handle that, and I suspect if such an approach were to become prevalent, that tool would either fix the glitch or become largely unused.
- hermitcrab 5y agoAre there any editors that let you insert a Unit separator character as easily as a comma?
- cbsmith 5y agoAll of the programmable ones? ;-)
- hermitcrab 5y agoSo that's a no then. ;0P
- cbsmith 5y ago? Quite the contrary. It's more, "all the ones that any craftsman should be using".
- lanstin 5y agoA lot of excels and csvs are made by people other than programming crafters.
- scbrg 5y agoAs with pretty much everything else computing, the world suffers because Microsoft has been dumping terrible tools on it for decades, and people just take their garbage as the way things have to be.
- barbarbar 5y agoBut it sounds like a very very good approach.