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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

The NA detection and higlighting is nice but I'm not sure how I feel about showing anything other than the exact textual value. I don't mind abridging quotes when they're not necessary, but showing "N/A", NA,, etc. as the same value is a bit iffy.

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When presented with a similar problem, I tend to use non-ascii characters. For example, in my `~/.psqlrc` I have:

    \pset null ␀

Looks like this in output:

    40 |       ␀ | 2021-09-23 20:42:32.536571 | ␀
    41 |      15 | 2021-09-23 20:42:33.177474 | ␀
    42 |      19 | 2021-09-23 20:42:33.212133 | ␀
    43 |       ␀ | 2021-09-23 20:42:33.247346 | ␀

I was going compain about null bytes in text (never, period), but then realized you actually did mean the U+2400 SYMBOL FOR NULL[0] character itself. That's surprisingly viable (though you do now have to worry about the string "\xE2\x90\x80" ending up in your data).

0: Which is actually incorrectly named - it should be "SYMBOL FOR NUL".

It is rough. There are many ways that different tools put NAs, na, N/A, "", etc. in a file. To chose only "NA" would mean I would be excluding the output of other tools. I chose accessibility over specificity. #trade-offs.

Maybe you could just background highlight the empty cells?

Well, I think being promiscuous with "NA", "N/A", nan, etc. is a separate issue from a blank cell. A blank cell is literally missing. That should be filled with NA.

> A blank cell is literally missing. That should be filled with NA.

Why? "NA" stands for "Not Applicable", but a blank cell in a CSV could represent any number of things of which "Not Applicable" is only one.

haha. You are right "NA" stands for "Not Applicable". That is not always how people/programs using it though. What are some alternatives that you would suggest? I am happy to learn.

I would suggest similar to what other people have suggested where you color the background of the cell red and then just display the literal content of the cell. I think it would be reasonable to have this configurable via command line arguments though, so if you like the "NA" that could also be a mode.

Perhaps it would make sense to have a "pretty" mode and a "literal" mode (which would also turn off the clever processing of numbers)?

I prefer "ND" (No Data), personally.

Fair enough but that doesn't explain why you chose to display all of them as "NA". As you say there are lots of different ones, hence it would be a bad idea to pick one as the 'default' to display. To me it's important whether something is missing, filled with "N/A", or "null", or "Not Applicable" etc.

Simple: provide CLI switches to let the user decide what they want for NA detection (current behavior as default, user can provide alternate NA values, per the source file or the natural language it is expressed in), and how they want them displayed, whether as-is, blank or a consistent custom value (as-is should be the default).

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