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

Mon Aug 26 01:56:40 UTC 2013

On 25 August 2013 01:38, Ian Ward <ian at excess.org> wrote:

> 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)
>
Yes indeed - one reason why simple data format
spec<http://data.okfn.org/standards/simple-data-format> requires
UTF-8 ...

> #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 hear you! That said many programs do produce sane CSV and perhaps
validation would help!

> I hate to say it but I prefer XLS for simple tables because of these
> issues.
>
Right but you lose a lot by that :-)

> 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.
>
I like JSON lines but average-person tools don't support it (e.g.
spreadsheets). Also do you know of an actual "spec" (even very rought) or
is it just. E.g. "object gets its own line"

Rufus

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Rufus Pollock

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