[Okfn-ca] Introduction to CSV on data.okfn.org (Rufus Pollock) - Fwd: okfn-labs Digest, Vol 31, Issue 20

Sun Aug 25 00:38:58 UTC 2013

In my experience the worst parts of CSV are:
1. no way to declare an encoding
2. people writing their own code to produce CSV

#1 will be solved once everyone adopts UTF-8 everywhere (well, sort of.
Unicode itself has its own issues)

#2 is a source of endless little problems. Are all the delimiters quoted?
Are quotes within quotes doubled? Are newlines within values properly
handled?

I hate to say it but I prefer XLS for simple tables because of these issues.

My favourite text format for streaming structured data these days is "JSON
Lines" (.jl). It can do tables, nested structures, simple data types,
unicode-stored-as-ascii and is almost completely unambiguous.
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