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Comment by alecst | Hacker News Reader

I work with CSVs often and we usually just use blanks like

  item1,item2,,item4,,,item7

to represent nulls. What do you think the pitfalls are here? (Sincere question, wondering how we can improve.)

This breaks in systems where an empty string “” != null but I don’t have an elegant solution.

A typical hack is to distinguish an empty field from a field with a quoted empty string. The former is null, the latter an empty string.