I'm a human and I love CSVs. What other format can I open in a spreadsheet, access through cat/grep/awk, and easily load into any programming language? Any other format has to sacrifice one of these three things, and that's bad. It's this trifecta that makes it so versatile and human friendly.
Developer friendly. Not human friendly. I used to receive CSVs of product data from clients, which they often handcrafted or manipulated by hand, and inevitably, and I mean inevitably, broke.
Of course, excel will make just as much of a mess - when the client hands back their sheet with all of their UPCs expressed as exponents and æ€ ligatures jammed next to every apostrophe, there’s no guessing as to what happened.
Honestly though, if people are doing that with CSVs there is no system where they won't also go off the reservation and do something insane with an excel file or sqlite or whatever. At least with CSVs there are common lines of code all around the internet to wrangle all sorts of issues.
Anything written by hand will be screwed up. Chances are if they're writing it by hand and it's badly formatted, they're not using something that has input or output validation anyways, and they're probably not going to budge from whatever workflow they're using.
I recall one of my old Phones could dump SMS messages as CSV. I wanted to be build and interface that would let me search through my messages.
Turns out when you have data that contains both commas and quotes things get screwey real quick. You could have quoted data like:
123,ABC,”,””,456
Where ,” is column data.
I think that standard method is to double quote the field, but the dump sure wasn’t doing that for me, plus what happens when the data is something like abc””,?
That is badly formatted CSV, assuming ” is a double-quote. Double-quote (") is how you escape commas, so the 3rd entry will make a parser barf, since there is no close quote.
It should be 123,ABC,"","",456
> Turns out when you have data that contains both commas and quotes things get screwey real quick.
Not really. It's pretty logical. If the entry has even one comma, put quotes around it. If it also has quotes, double each of them. Otherwise don't worry about it.
> what happens when the data is something like abc””,?
Some people like me never generate CSVs like that. If someone sends me a CSV with quotes, I reject it and say "clean up your data". It's okay to say, "we're not going to allow escape characters in our CSV grammar. We're going to have a higher standard"
