8 ms·

In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quo

In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quotes and newlines. That was probably the last time I ever saw ASCII control characters used as intended in the wild. There is no technical reason why CSV should have won out, except that keyboards have a comma key and almost never a ^A key.

deleted 2y ago
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jbeninger 2y ago
That's a huge technical obstacle for most people though. The whole point of XSV formats is to be human editable. There are better formats for computer-to computer records. If you can't the core delimiters on a keyboard, your format is going to lose out despite any of us other benefits
- packetlost 2y ago
  That doesn't need to be an obstacle, a graphical editor that lets you click a button to add a row/column exists for nearly every other tabular format. It only matters if you want to edit the file using a plaintext editor. If the format were popular, shortcuts would be created to enter the delimiters in many plaintext editors too, which is a chicken/egg problem but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's not a solvable problem.
  - jbeninger 2y ago
    If you're using a bespoke editor anyway, why are you restricting yourself to a texty format? XSV formats inhabit this weird space halfway between data exchange and human readable. They're a compromise. If you go full data exchange you might as well use something even better suited for the job.
    - packetlost 2y ago
      You don't really have to have a bespoke editor, you just have to display the control characters sanely in an otherwise normal plaintext editor and add a shortcut or menu item to insert the control characters.
- ablob 2y ago
  It's an editor issue then. "Back in the old days", people used to understand how to input ^A and ^B. Showing these characters is also only a mere addition in the character set. Sure, there is inertia to change, but even rich text format is/was supported by windows. Being unable to deal with this is a lazyness of the developer that spilled into the user being unable to deal with it. This is nothing a user can't be trained on, and I'd argue it makes more sense than weird escaping sequences in the event you actually do want a ",". P.S.: But then again, with proper editors the escaping issue vanishes - and no, I do not mean IDE's. Lots of people decided it was worth it to support rtf, I figure the decision to support 2 additional characters is way easier in a user friendly way.
cempaka 2y ago
The FIX financial protocol still uses ^A.

deleted 2y ago

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jbeninger 2y ago

That's a huge technical obstacle for most people though. The whole point of XSV formats is to be human editable. There are better formats for computer-to computer records. If you can't the core delimiters on a keyboard, your format is going to lose out despite any of us other benefits

packetlost 2y ago
That doesn't need to be an obstacle, a graphical editor that lets you click a button to add a row/column exists for nearly every other tabular format. It only matters if you want to edit the file using a plaintext editor. If the format were popular, shortcuts would be created to enter the delimiters in many plaintext editors too, which is a chicken/egg problem but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's not a solvable problem.
- jbeninger 2y ago
  If you're using a bespoke editor anyway, why are you restricting yourself to a texty format? XSV formats inhabit this weird space halfway between data exchange and human readable. They're a compromise. If you go full data exchange you might as well use something even better suited for the job.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    You don't really have to have a bespoke editor, you just have to display the control characters sanely in an otherwise normal plaintext editor and add a shortcut or menu item to insert the control characters.
ablob 2y ago
It's an editor issue then. "Back in the old days", people used to understand how to input ^A and ^B. Showing these characters is also only a mere addition in the character set. Sure, there is inertia to change, but even rich text format is/was supported by windows. Being unable to deal with this is a lazyness of the developer that spilled into the user being unable to deal with it. This is nothing a user can't be trained on, and I'd argue it makes more sense than weird escaping sequences in the event you actually do want a ",". P.S.: But then again, with proper editors the escaping issue vanishes - and no, I do not mean IDE's. Lots of people decided it was worth it to support rtf, I figure the decision to support 2 additional characters is way easier in a user friendly way.

cempaka 2y ago

The FIX financial protocol still uses ^A.