James Felix Black: Yes! But also using a valid character as a separator is just nightmarish path dependent horror

I’ve been using excel for years. I’ve opened a lot of .csv files in that stretch. Never has a single one of those files been tab delimited. But I’ve had to tell excel that a comma, not the tab has been the separator every time. In a “comma separated value” file type.

This is a very good point! Legacy situation. :)

I love that it has the flexibility to have any number of arbitrary separators! I understand that there’s a lot of weird corner cases! But for all the dumb assumptions excel makes, let’s maybe save a bunch of people a click there.

Yes! But also using a valid character as a separator is just nightmarish path dependent horror

sometimes I think it would be like NASA being required to build parts of the JWST out of wood because that's the way telescopes were made in the 1700s "The first 32 characters in the ASCII-table are unprintable control codes and are used to control peripherals such as printers."

ASCII table - Table of ASCII codes, characters and symbolswww.ascii-code.com A complete list of all ASCII codes, characters, symbols and signs included in the 7-bit ASCII table and the extended ASCII table according to the Windows-1252 character set, which is a superset of ISO...

Path dependence is so powerful.

I’ve written enough text-mangling scripts to learn just how easily you can destroy your datasets if you don’t plan your structures and parsers with care. The number of times I’ve thought about past me and thought “what in the HELL were you doing?” But I feel like csvs using commas is understood.

No, it's well established and an enormous amount of energy has been spent making it work, and people should just use CSV to export from/input to Excel in the general case. But man alive.

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