In abstract CSV is great. In reality, it is a nightmare not because of CSV, but because of all the legacy tools that product it in slightly different ways (diff

In abstract CSV is great. In reality, it is a nightmare not because of CSV, but because of all the legacy tools that product it in slightly different ways (different character encodings mostly - excel still produces some variant of latin1, some tools drop a BOM in your UTF8, etc). Unless you control the producer of the data you are stuck trying to infer the character encoding and transcoding to your destination, and there's no foolproof way of doing that.