• Honytawk@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    CSV isn’t nightmarish, it is just a table structure in text form. You can open it with any text editor.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The problem is that it’s not really a standard. It’s reinvented ad-hoc by whomever programs it today.

      Should there be any whitespace after the comma? Do you want to use pipes or some other character instead of commas (ASCII 0x1E is sitting over there for exactly this purpose, but it’s been ignored for decades)? How do you handle escaping your separator char inside the dataset? Are you [CR] or [LF} or [CR] [LF]? None of these questions have a set answer. Even JSON has more specification than this.