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

The only true Unix column format is ascii delimited text.

Oddly no one has heard of that, the only reason why I found out about it is because I had to read in punched tapes with 7 character ascii from an experiment done in the 80s during my undergrad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter#ASCII_delimited_text



Fascinating, thanks. In all of the large projects I've worked on, the CSV format variants and their inconsistencies have caused disasters. Who knew that Pandas and Spark handle CSV settings differently by default and spark has a hard time with newlines in its CSV output. CSVs inconsistencies result in a lot of data corruption, doubly so in large teams.

Replacing CSV with flat JSON or parquet depending on the use case has been a good move for avoiding these issues. The risks of CSV are usually just too high.


Quad-spaced facepalm.... How come these were dropped out of usage ?!?




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

Search: