Comment by togakangaroo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by togakangaroo | Hacker News Reader

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Hey, I'm the author of the linked article, cool to see this is still getting passed around.

Definitely agree there's no perfect solution. There's some escaping that seems to work ok, but that's going to break CSV-imports.

An imperfect solutions is that applications should be designed with task-driven UIs so that they know the intended purpose of a CSV export and can make the decision to escape/not escape then. Libraries can help drive this by designing their interfaces in a similar manner. Something like `export_csv_for_eventual_import()`, `export_csv_for_spreadsheet_viewing()`.

Another imperfect solution would be to ... ugh...generate exports in Excel format rather than CSV. I know, I know, but it does solve the problem.

Or we could just get everyone in the world to switch to emacs csv-mode as a csv viewer. I'm down with that as well.

Appreciate your work! Your piece was pivotal in changing my mind about whether this should be considered in our purview to address.

The intention-based philosophy of all this makes a lot of sense, was eye opening, and I agree it should be the first approach. Unfortunately after considering our use cases, we quickly realized that we'd have no way of knowing how customers intend to use the csv exports they've requested - we've talked to some of them and it's a mix. We could approach things case by case but we really just want a setup which works well 99% of the time and mitigates known risk. We settled on the prefixing approach and have yet to receive any complaints about it, specifically using a space character with the mind that something unobtrusive (eg. easily strippable) but also visible, would be best - to avoid quirks stemming from something completely hidden.

Thank again for your writing and thoughts, like I said above I haven't found much else of quality on the topic.

>Another imperfect solution would be to ... ugh...generate exports in Excel format rather than CSV. I know, I know, but it does solve the problem.

Or you could just use the ISO standard .xlsx, which is a widely supported format that is not Excel specific but has first class support in Excel.

>Another imperfect solution would be to ... ugh...generate exports in Excel format rather than CSV. I know, I know, but it does solve the problem.

That's honestly a good solution and the end users prefer it anyway.

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