Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is a pet peeve of mine: csv was a bad format already when it was created, because it intermixes data with meta data, ie it uses characters that can appear as either data or control characters, leading to escaping issues. This is in addition to being under specified as to which characters are used as control characters.

It was outdated from the start because ASCII already has specific characters for file, group, record, and item separation. Using this would give broad compatibility and a wider feature set (eg. more than one table in a file) while retaining all the benefits of csv.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: