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The great thing about comma as a field separator is (1) the character is visible and (2) the character is common, so if there are escaping bugs in either the ge
by eirikbakke 3y ago
The great thing about comma as a field separator is (1) the character is visible and (2) the character is common, so if there are escaping bugs in either the generator or the parser, they will quickly become apparent. Much better to fail fast than having a parse error at line 28357283 because a more uncommon separator character somehow still made its way into the data.
- tambourine_man 3y agoWe have editors that can work with invisible characters. It’s not hard. I do that all the time in Vim with tabs and CR/LF anyway. Unfortunately that ship has sailed. We have standards for escaping commas, escaping quotes, it’s escaping all the way down
- dheera 3y ago> (1) the character is visible and This can be fixed in the font
- demondemidi 3y agoThis all predates fonts as we know them today. TTY were limited by the keyboard and the character generator ROM. Today no one thinks twice.
- thayne 3y agoThe bad thing is that it is common so you have to escape a lot. The much worse thing is that csv implementations have varying ways of handling escaping, or sometimes don't support escaping at all, so in practice csv files can't be used interoperably.