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That's because anyone can easily make a tab character with their keyboard. No one ever remembers the key combination for those special ascii characters.
by zepolen 2y ago
That's because anyone can easily make a tab character with their keyboard. No one ever remembers the key combination for those special ascii characters.
- kstrauser 2y agoIf it became popular, all common editors would have an easy way to type them.
- crazygringo 2y agoAnd if there were an easy way to type them, then people would start using them in strings. And then they'd have to be escaped. And we'd be back where we started.
- cylinder714 2y agoThis encapsulates my problem with CSVs: - If I send someone a spreadsheet, they'll open it with a spreadsheet application; Excel, LibreOffice, whatever. - If I send someone a CSV file, they'll want to open it with a text editor. Ack, no! Open it with a spreadsheet app, or load it into SQLite, or, best of all, open it with VisiData or some kind of editor designed for tabular data. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/
- hobs 2y agoActually no - spreadsheets classically choose their own way to interpret CSVs, that's the classic way to get your client to continue to send you support requests. There's a reason so many tools export to xls instead of csv.
- cm2187 2y agoAnd if you just double click on a csv file to open it in excel (rather than importing from excel), excel will happily corrupt your data. Trim leading zeros in IDs, round large integers, not spot the date column is in us vs european format, etc.
- uncharted9 2y agoExcel will happily ignore if you use tabs as delimiter and show all the columns as a single column. Atleast LibreOffice tries to figure out and confirms the delimiter before opening CSV.