6 ms·
Why was a comma originally chosen over, I dunno, say a pipe character?
by pupppet 19d ago
Why was a comma originally chosen over, I dunno, say a pipe character?
- dylan604 19d agoYeah, this is something frustrating to me. A comma is just way too common of a symbol used in everyday text. So if you're using something other than numerical data like strings. Quotes are another thing where trying to escape quotes escaping commas decreases the human readability. CSV parsers can usually designate the delimiter and escape characters, so you can use a more unique delimiter. Will the recipient of your file parse correctly or just assume it's a single column file?
- quuxplusone 19d agoBecause English. If you're writing a data file and one row of data elements is like "one, red, 3.14, Tuesday," why wouldn't you write exactly that in your ASCII text file? And when you do, that's CSV!