But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those can include support for ASCII separators?
Let's say we have a product master. Something looks fishy and we want a brand person or product supply person to check... Push a CSV and it's trivially easy for them to open in XL and check, make corrections and send.
In a business context, this happens far more often than you may expect. Sure you can build a custom platform to validate and make people connect to a form connecting to a database - but Excel is a great user interface and everyone knows excel.
A funny incident - we were struggling to build a complex workflow in KNIME where at some points we need user input. Nothing out of the box was great - tools either assume a dashboard paradigm or a data flow paradigm - nothing
In between.
One of our creative folks came up with the solution of writing to a CSV and getting KNIME to open it in excel. The user would make changes and save, close excel and continue the workflow in KNIME. Even completely non technical people got it.
We had to ban our non-technical users from opening CSVs in Excel because it would strip leading zeros and do other exciting things like convert large numbers to 1.23123E+20 :(
It does this without any notification or warning when you save.
Kill me...i've dealt with flat file ETL for ~9 years now, with the first 2 pretty much dedicated to it. I hate hate hate Excel for no reason other than that. It has wasted so many hours due to customers messing up their identifiers by opening up their feeds in Excel prior to sending, and accidentally transforming like above, then having to fix changing customer identifiers used throughout the system once they figure out what happened.
Excel can only display CSV files. I had to ban myself from editing files in Excel because it’s atrocious at it. It also likes to somewhat change decimal-seperators (again, without any warning).
“A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions.”
That paper is from 2016, at least 12 years after the problem was first identified.
That behavior is technically correct because those are all valid representations of that value, e.g., 007449938 = 7449938 = 7.449938E6. Pretty much any plain text (or binary) data format will have this same issue, unless it supports additional metadata for display purposes.
If you intended the data to be a string value, then it should have been enclosed in quotes.
Your assertion sounded incorrect so I tested it. Quoting large numbers does not preserve them on a save.
Adding a ' before it should work, but for data extracted from arbitrary systems you'll have few guarantees of the sort. Formatting the cells in Excel to display the full value instead of the truncated value also works from memory, but you won't always know ahead of time if this happened later in the file.
In our case it was often mailing identifier barcodes so any loss of precision made them entirely useless.
What if the value is an ID rather than an integer? CSV doesn't specify whether the data type is a string or a number. The schema needs to be inferred by the parser/user.
> But humans rarely use notepad these days. They use code editors like Coda or VSCode at the very least which have all kinds of advanced features. Surely, those can include support for ASCII separators?
I do a fair amount of work with companies that do "EDI" over CSV (or worse CSV-like - think 2 CSVs jammed together with different formats, no headers, no support for escaping or quoting) and fixed width documents. I can absolutely assure you that humans do open these files in notepad far more often than I'd like.
Often one of the main reasons they don't use things like X12, ASCII separators, etc. is because a "human needs to open it at some point" was a prevailing business decision some number of years ago (think "what happens if the IT system fails? how can we still ship stuff even in a complete emergency") and now it's baked into their documented process so deeply its like shouting into the wind to alter things. Third party warehouses are the worst at this.
Or they use Excel, which can introduce its own entertaining errors.
A few years back while working on something that unavoidably used large quantities of CSV data we would sternly warn people not to use Excel, but people still did it ("But I just looked at it!").
