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CSV files have to survive human transcription and editing; it's part of what makes them useful.
by mjevans 5y ago
CSV files have to survive human transcription and editing; it's part of what makes them useful.
- colanderman 5y agoI am imagining an alternate reality where text editors have basic support for displaying tabular data, formatted using US/RS/GS/FS, the same way they support TAB, CR/LF, and FF. But, modern text editors almost universally can't even manage to provide a coherent means of editing boldface text (cursors always get stuck on the wrong side of a hidden tag). So I doubt such a feature would have been well supported, even had it existed at all.
- mjevans 5y agoI forgot the program, but older, probably many older, programs used to allow editing Rich Text formatted files in both a visual mode and also in a behind the scenes mode. The format codes could be both edited and copied. However that requires a smarter program to display the data the intended way. CSV files, and their cousin of sorts TSV files, can often be sufficiently read both raw as well as on line printers.