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What are all these hypothetical humans doing with CSV files? I've worked with them a lot, and the only time I read one manually is to find out why it isn't pars
by danellis 5y ago
What are all these hypothetical humans doing with CSV files? I've worked with them a lot, and the only time I read one manually is to find out why it isn't parsing properly. I'm not writing them by hand. I'm not extracting data from them by hand. What are other people doing?
- crazygringo 5y agoMainly Ctrl+F and diffs, in my case. Sometimes you need to look up a single code in a 50 MB file. And sometimes you need a quick check to see if one line or a million lines changes. It's "exception not the rule" type stuff... but it sure comes in handy to be able to check this stuff quick with basic text tools than have to run it through some binary parser. Same as JSON. But unlike protobufs for example.
- danellis 5y agoInteresting. I would reach for `grep` and `diff` in those cases, so it's not much of a leap to imagine similarly using a tool for a binary format. After all, I only need the textual representation of the thing I'm searching for, not the entire dataset.
- crazygringo 5y agoSure, but those specific tools need to be written for each specific binary format. And honestly they usually simply don't exist. In the vast majority of cases, in my experience.