Show HN: Unicode Separated Values (USV) for data formatting

github.com

2 pointsjph2 comments

Author claims it is editable in regular editors, but there are no newlines there, so it would be just one huge line; I cannot imagine doing any edits other than simplest typos. And with the delimiters so similar, even copy-pasting lines around would be fraught with error. I suppose you can have editor plugin to wrap lines, but if we are talking about editor plugins, might as well use some other well-known format.

I don't see why one would ever use it over CSV or JSON/JSONlines or your favorite binary formats.

Thanks. I'm the author, so happy to answer. I'll improve the documentation thanks to your feedback.

Newlines can go anywhere you want. For example, content can contain newlines, and also markup can contain escape + newline if you want to have visual wrapping. I'll add examples.

Why use USV instead of CSV? USV has more power to represent data such spreadsheet folios and database schemas, while simultaneously being simpler (because of cleaner escaping) and faster to parse (because of a simpler syntax).

Why use USV instead of JSON? For tabular data, such as spreadsheets and SQL databases, USV is simpler (e.g. no keys, no values) and faster.

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