Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by treesprite82 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

treesprite82

> easy to manually edit (Notepad++ shows the unit separator as a ‘US’ symbol)

Won't it all be in one long line?

> Typing \u001F or \u001E in some editors might be a faff, but it is hardly a showstopper.

Doesn't seem negligible when the editability issues with CSV were also minor.

> No escaping. If you want to put \u001F or \u001E in your data – tough you can’t. Use a different format.

Wanting those characters specifically is rare, but wanting to safely store an arbitrary unicode string - maybe a filename - is very common. Parsers might invent their own escaping to handle this.

View on HN

>Won't it all be in one long line?

Depends on whether editors start a newline for \u001E. Notepad++ doesn't. Than is definately going affect readability. Hmmm.

>Doesn't seem negligible when the editability issues with CSV were also minor.

The issue with CSV, as far as I am concerned, is the escaping. And that isn't minor from either a readability or parsing point of view.

>Wanting those characters specifically is rare, but wanting to safely store an arbitrary unicode string - maybe a filename - is very common. Parsers might invent their own escaping to handle this.

Are \u001F or \u001E even legal filename characters on any OS? These codes could turn up by chance in a blob of binary data. But it isn't intended for binary data.

> The issue with CSV, as far as I am concerned, is the escaping. And that isn't minor from either a readability or parsing point of view.

For parsing I'd agree, as you've eliminated the need to handle escaping by declaring some characters off-limits. But for manual editing, to start a .usv file with most editors people would be copying the characters from google rather than just being able to type commas and newlines.

> Are \u001F or \u001E even legal filename characters on any OS? These codes could turn up by chance in a blob of binary data. But it isn't intended for binary data.

Generally I believe NUL and / are the only ASCII characters considered safe to never occur in file/directory names.

> But for manual editing, to start a .usv file with most editors people would be copying the characters from google rather than just being able to type commas and newlines.

That is an issue. However Notepad++ has an "ASCII codes insertion panel". Many other editors probably have something similar. So it isn't too hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com