USusrbinbash·Aug 14, 2024
> CSVs are kinda bad.
Not really.
What's bad is when people keep insisting on coming up with new and amazing CSV dialects.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt is very clear about what CSV files are supposed to look like, and the fact that people keep ignoring this for whatever reason, is not the formats problem.
And no, "using another format" is not a solution to this. Because: I can just invent a new DSV dialect. Or a JSON dialect. Or a dialect where the field separator is "0xFF00FF00" and the row separator is the string `DECAFCOFFEE` encoded in EBCDIC, all other characters have to be UTF-32, except for a, b and f, which also need to be EBCDIC encoded.
> For starters, it’s rather unreadable when opened in a text editor. But I bet you don’t really do that with your CSVs all that often anyway!
Wrong. I do that with csv files all the time.
Read the rest
In fact I even have an amazing vim plugin just for them [0]. That's pretty much the point of having a plaintext tabular data storage format: That I can view and edit it using standard text wrangling utilities.
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There is a much simpler solution to this problem: Don't accept broken CSV. If people keep ignoring standards, thats their problem.
[0]: https://github.com/mechatroner/rainbow_csv