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Comment by radicaledward | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to see you list tsv as more common than csv. I encounter csv's on a pretty regular basis, but I don't think I've had to parse a tsv in the past 3 or 4 years. As a junior web developer, I don't have much experience though. 9 times out of 10, the csv is coming from or going to Excel, or a system that was designed to support Excel. If you don't mind my asking, what types of data do you regularly work with that are in tsv format?

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Your comment disturbs me a little… One of my gripes with Excel was that it imported and produced TSV data by default when you asked for CSV.

Excel actually doesn't 'care'. It uses the record separator defined in your Windows "Regional Settings", and the defaults there differ for each system locale.

TSV is nicer for output (on stderr/out or a logfile), so tends to crop op if you want to parse the output/logfile of something. I haven’t seen Excel in use at my workplace yet.

Surely only if you're dealing with fixed-width fields.

Floating point values with a given precision and some integers. We’ll have to buy a proper supercomputer before the latter take more than seven digits :\

ohhm this is pain in the ass format. srsly everything can happen there...

There tends to be less overhead in TSV. Unless you want to represent text that has embedded tabs it seems unnecessary. It works with standard *nix tools. Not a bad compromise and part of the reason that people whose standard "file" is 100Gb prefer it.

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