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What do you mean by csv shd not support this. Do you mean it was a historical mistake or new parsers shdnt be able to read it?
by andi999 4y ago
What do you mean by csv shd not support this. Do you mean it was a historical mistake or new parsers shdnt be able to read it?
- otikik 4y agoMy opinion is that it was a historical mistake. I think if the format would have been clearly specified in Microsoft Excel humanity would have saved billions in parsing labour. On the question wether new parsers shouldn't be able to read it... if I have to build them or maintain them, then *those* parsers shouldn't be able to read it. I don't want to have to deal with the whole messiness of the thing, and I know how to change Excel's locale to generate CSV in a reasonable format. If it's something that someone else maintains and I can mostly ignore the crazy number formatting as well as other quirks, I could live with it. But I would still prefer if they didn't implement any of it, because the extra code could make the parts that I need worse (for example, by provoking a segfault, or making a line ambiguous). Even if it's parsers that other people use and I never use, I still would prefer if they didn't do it, because that would increase the overall possibility of me having to deal with another (sigh) semicolon-separated CSV file.