6 ms·

Commas are commonly used in text, too.

susam 1y ago
Clearly they should have gone with BEL as the delimiter. printf "alice\007london\007uk\nbob\007paris\007france\n" > data.bsv I'm hoping no reasonable person would ever use BEL as punctuation or decimal separator.
- kmoser 1y ago
  On the off chance you're not being facetious, why not ASCII 0 as a delimiter? (This is a rhetorical question.)
  - defrost 1y ago
    There are some decent arguments for BEL over NUL, however given you posed that as a rhetorical question I feel I can say little other than ding! ding! ding! winner winner, chicken dinner! Although BEL would drive me up the wall if I broke out any of my old TTY hardware.
  - mastax 1y ago
    ASCII has characters more or less designed for this 0x1C - File Separator 0x1D - Group Separator 0x1E - Record Separator 0x1F - Unit Separator So I guess 1F would be the "comma" and 1E would be the "newline."
    - afiori 1y ago
      https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-file-group-record-unit-separator-control-characters-and-their-usage https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-fil... I am pretty sure you shifted the meaning, the decimal separator is part of the atomic data it does not need a control character. You would use 1F instead of the comma/semicolon/tab and 1E to split lines (record means line just like in SQL). You could then use 1D to store multiple CSV tables in a single file.
      - pasc1878 1y ago
        Yes but then the text is not human readable or editable in a plain text editor. This would confuse most users of csvs they are not programmers they at most use text editors and Excel.
        afiori 1y ago
        I am not proposing to do this, but if you were to use ascii separators you would do it this way
- dessimus 1y ago
  If one was going to use a non-printable character as a delimiter, why wouldn't they use the literal record separator "\030"?
  - susam 1y ago
    Every time you cat a BSV file, your terminal beeps like it's throwing a tantrum. A record separator (RS) based file would be missing this feature! In other words, my previous comment was just a joke! :) By the way, RS is decimal 30 (not octal '\030'). In octal, RS is '\036'. For example: $ printf '\036' | xxd -p 1e $ printf '\x1e' | xxd -p 1e See also https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/ascii https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/ascii for confirmation.
kevindamm 1y ago
...and excel macros
LoganDark 1y ago
Sure, let's put quotation marks around all number values. Oh wait. lol

Clearly they should have gone with BEL as the delimiter. printf "alice\007london\007uk\nbob\007paris\007france\n" > data.bsv I'm hoping no reasonable person would ever use BEL as punctuation or decimal separator.

kmoser 1y ago
On the off chance you're not being facetious, why not ASCII 0 as a delimiter? (This is a rhetorical question.)
- defrost 1y ago
  There are some decent arguments for BEL over NUL, however given you posed that as a rhetorical question I feel I can say little other than ding! ding! ding! winner winner, chicken dinner! Although BEL would drive me up the wall if I broke out any of my old TTY hardware.
- mastax 1y ago
  ASCII has characters more or less designed for this 0x1C - File Separator 0x1D - Group Separator 0x1E - Record Separator 0x1F - Unit Separator So I guess 1F would be the "comma" and 1E would be the "newline."
  - afiori 1y ago
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-file-group-record-unit-separator-control-characters-and-their-usage https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-fil... I am pretty sure you shifted the meaning, the decimal separator is part of the atomic data it does not need a control character. You would use 1F instead of the comma/semicolon/tab and 1E to split lines (record means line just like in SQL). You could then use 1D to store multiple CSV tables in a single file.
    - pasc1878 1y ago
      Yes but then the text is not human readable or editable in a plain text editor. This would confuse most users of csvs they are not programmers they at most use text editors and Excel.
      - afiori 1y ago
        I am not proposing to do this, but if you were to use ascii separators you would do it this way
dessimus 1y ago
If one was going to use a non-printable character as a delimiter, why wouldn't they use the literal record separator "\030"?
- susam 1y ago
  Every time you cat a BSV file, your terminal beeps like it's throwing a tantrum. A record separator (RS) based file would be missing this feature! In other words, my previous comment was just a joke! :) By the way, RS is decimal 30 (not octal '\030'). In octal, RS is '\036'. For example: $ printf '\036' | xxd -p 1e $ printf '\x1e' | xxd -p 1e See also https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/ascii https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/ascii for confirmation.

kevindamm 1y ago

...and excel macros

LoganDark 1y ago

Sure, let's put quotation marks around all number values. Oh wait. lol