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I remembered seeing a comment like this before, and... comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305052 co

I remembered seeing a comment like this before, and... comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305052 comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39679662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39679662 "ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text" post [2014]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600 same post [2024]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42100499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42100499 comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440801 (...and many more.) "This comes up every single time someone mentions CSV. Without fail." - top reply from burntsushi in that last link, and it remains as true today as in 2017 :D You're not wrong though, we just need some major text editor to get the ball rolling and start making some attempts to understand these characters, and the rest will follow suit. We're kinda stuck at a local optimum which is clearly not ideal but also not troublesome enough to easily drum up wide support for ADSV (ASCII Delimiter Separated Values).

ryandrake 2y ago
Hahah, I came here to make the comment about ASCII's control characters, so I'm glad someone else beat me to it, and also that someone further pointed out that this topic comes up every time someone mentions CSV!
scythe 2y ago
>we just need some major text editor to get the ball rolling and start making some attempts to understand these characters Many text editors offer extensions APIs, including Vim, Emacs, Notepad++. But the ideal behavior would be to auto-align record separators and treat unit separators as a special kind of newline. That would allow the file to actually look like a table within the text editor. Input record separator as shift+space and unit separator as shift+enter.
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  I think it would be enough for: 1. the field separator to be shown as a special character 2. the row separator to be (optionally) be interpreted as a linefeed IIRC 1) is true for Notepad++, but not 2).
nukem222 2y ago
Excel needs to default its export to this. Unfortunately excel is proprietary software and therefore fucked.

ryandrake 2y ago

Hahah, I came here to make the comment about ASCII's control characters, so I'm glad someone else beat me to it, and also that someone further pointed out that this topic comes up every time someone mentions CSV!

scythe 2y ago

>we just need some major text editor to get the ball rolling and start making some attempts to understand these characters Many text editors offer extensions APIs, including Vim, Emacs, Notepad++. But the ideal behavior would be to auto-align record separators and treat unit separators as a special kind of newline. That would allow the file to actually look like a table within the text editor. Input record separator as shift+space and unit separator as shift+enter.

hermitcrab 2y ago
I think it would be enough for: 1. the field separator to be shown as a special character 2. the row separator to be (optionally) be interpreted as a linefeed IIRC 1) is true for Notepad++, but not 2).

nukem222 2y ago

Excel needs to default its export to this. Unfortunately excel is proprietary software and therefore fucked.