CSV files are simply lists of tuples. You can do lists of lists in JSON. Your overhead will be two characters (opening/closing braces) per tuple (one if you ski

CSV files are simply lists of tuples. You can do lists of lists in JSON. Your overhead will be two characters (opening/closing braces) per tuple (one if you skip the newline, which you can't skip in CSV), plus a dozen characters for the whole file. I don't think that's a lot of overhead, seeing that you get the benefits of a format that is actually standardized. Example (CSV): name,age James,32 Nina,10 Helga,90 JSON: {"fields":["name","age"], "content":[ ["James",32], ["Nina",10], ["Helga",90] ]} Don't tell me it's harder to parse, cause you'd have to do the index→fieldname conversion in CSV too.