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Who said anything about escaping a character? For most datasets, having actual tab characters is rare, especially if you can just replace them with spaces. Same
by mbreese 13y ago
Who said anything about escaping a character? For most datasets, having actual tab characters is rare, especially if you can just replace them with spaces. Same with newlines - the just aren't needed in a lot of data. If you're dealing with user-derived text content, tab delimited files might not be the best choice. However, it's great for tabular data.
With CSV, you have to escape quotes, commas, and newlines. With tab delimited, you only have to escape tabs and newlines - and that's if they can't be sanitized out to begin with.
- MichaelGG 13y agoI mean for the general case. Sure, more datasets may be tab-safe than comma-safe. CSV doesn't need quotes if there's no commas. TSV needs quotes or something if the data contains tabs.
- mbreese 13y agoOr, you just escape the tab. \t style. (Well, then you need to escape \\, and \n, etc). Really, it just gets messy at that point. Which is why I try to avoid free text in tab delimited files. It's not much better in CSV if you allow newlines within cells.