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I was surprised to see you list tsv as more common than csv. I encounter csv's on a pretty regular basis, but I don't think I've had to parse a tsv in the past
by radicaledward 13y ago
I was surprised to see you list tsv as more common than csv. I encounter csv's on a pretty regular basis, but I don't think I've had to parse a tsv in the past 3 or 4 years. As a junior web developer, I don't have much experience though. 9 times out of 10, the csv is coming from or going to Excel, or a system that was designed to support Excel. If you don't mind my asking, what types of data do you regularly work with that are in tsv format?
- claudius 13y agoTSV is nicer for output (on stderr/out or a logfile), so tends to crop op if you want to parse the output/logfile of something. I haven’t seen Excel in use at my workplace yet.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoSurely only if you're dealing with fixed-width fields.
- l-p 13y agoYour comment disturbs me a little… One of my gripes with Excel was that it imported and produced TSV data by default when you asked for CSV.
- shrikant 13y agoExcel actually doesn't 'care'. It uses the record separator defined in your Windows "Regional Settings", and the defaults there differ for each system locale.
- eggie 13y agoThere tends to be less overhead in TSV. Unless you want to represent text that has embedded tabs it seems unnecessary. It works with standard *nix tools. Not a bad compromise and part of the reason that people whose standard "file" is 100Gb prefer it.