4 ms·

>If you think you can do better than CSV, let's see your proposal. I've got one! It's basically the same as regular CSV, but everything is UTF-8, the columns

>If you think you can do better than CSV, let's see your proposal. I've got one! It's basically the same as regular CSV, but everything is UTF-8, the columns and lines are delineated by dedicated UTF-8 "delineator" codepoints (if they aren't defined in the spec, find reasonable surrogates and use them), and therefore nothing ever needs to be escaped. More human readable than regular CSV, less prone to error and just as easy to write to in a for loop (easier, in fact, as there are no escapes). Depending on how Excel handles delineators, it should be able to import it too.

jedimastert 5y ago
fun fact: ascii (and utf-8) has separators! There's a "file separator", "group separator", "record separator", and "unit separator".|
- politician 5y ago
  This whole “problem” with CSV boils down to ignorance of the purpose of ANSI characters below 32. This has been a solved problem for decades.
pwinnski 5y ago
So... I can't just type up a file in this new format in a text editor, since the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard. That makes it not quite as good as CSV for at least one use case, and certainly much less flexible. Replacing flexible standards with more-rigid standards is always really hard.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard [Alt]-[(NumPad:)0031] [Alt]-[(NumPad:)0030] Yeah, not quite dedicated keys. But once you've typed in one of each, you can copy and paste. Somewhat better text editors hopefully display them in some fashion (e.g, NotePad++ shows them as little black blobs labelled "FS" / "GS" / "RS" / "US").
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    That's a solution for MS Windows computers with extended keyboards only, so still not on my keyboard. The set of keyboards that lack numpads or are not connected to machines running MS Windows is much larger than the set of keyboards without commas. But yes, nothing is technically insurmountable. It's just hard to imagine a format that requires such efforts overtaking a format that does not.

jedimastert 5y ago

fun fact: ascii (and utf-8) has separators! There's a "file separator", "group separator", "record separator", and "unit separator".|

politician 5y ago
This whole “problem” with CSV boils down to ignorance of the purpose of ANSI characters below 32. This has been a solved problem for decades.

pwinnski 5y ago

So... I can't just type up a file in this new format in a text editor, since the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard. That makes it not quite as good as CSV for at least one use case, and certainly much less flexible. Replacing flexible standards with more-rigid standards is always really hard.

CRConrad 5y ago
> the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard [Alt]-[(NumPad:)0031] [Alt]-[(NumPad:)0030] Yeah, not quite dedicated keys. But once you've typed in one of each, you can copy and paste. Somewhat better text editors hopefully display them in some fashion (e.g, NotePad++ shows them as little black blobs labelled "FS" / "GS" / "RS" / "US").
- pwinnski 5y ago
  That's a solution for MS Windows computers with extended keyboards only, so still not on my keyboard. The set of keyboards that lack numpads or are not connected to machines running MS Windows is much larger than the set of keyboards without commas. But yes, nothing is technically insurmountable. It's just hard to imagine a format that requires such efforts overtaking a format that does not.