Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

They're hard to type though. You need to teach people how to use those -vs- just using a comma.

And they still don't fix the escaping problem. You might as well use a niche utf8 emoji as a separator. Editors at least know how to consistently render an emoji.

Does your data include ascii 30 and 31?

As a co-op student I used a library to achieve fool proof encoding in csv so it escaped and quoted everything as necessary so commas,\, and quotes and any other character could be included in the data, but it was rejected since the plain text files were difficult to read and edit by hand!

One typical scenario is to embed a CSV (or whatever it is called) into another one.

Hilariously I have actually seen this done.

Which emoji was it? Scissors?

Nah nothing funny like that, just a shape I think blue circle.

The ease of typing a character should only matter for artisanal, hand-typed files.

I agree. So if we don't need this hand crafted and for human consumption, we may as well just use some TLV or LV encoding instead of the CSV madness of separators and escaping. CSV is basically designed for hand crafting.

They are also easy to read, perhaps easier than a 'space' or other character. Although this could be because we are just used to seeing data eg CSV in this way

What do you mean comma? csv uses tabs. /s

Technically that is a TSV file. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com