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Comment by Raticide | Hacker News Reader

What's a good alternative non-proprietary format that all major spreadsheet software supports?

Unicode is vast. There's absolutely no good reason we don't have Snowman Separated Values (or some other proper separator sign that isn't commonly used elsewhere) other than that people don't demand it.

Herein lies the slippery slope to APL...

You don't even need to go to Unicode. ASCII has

  0x1C  FS  File Separator
  0x1D  GS  Group Separator
  0x1E  RS  Record Separator
  0x1F  US  Unit Separator

You just need a font with glyphs for them.

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

Where can I find those on my keyboard? Entering escape sequences by hand isn't user friendly, if it works at all. One of the benefits of csv is that it's universal, I can open it in vim or write an awk script to extract values, someone else can open in notepad++, someone else should be able to open in excel.

They are ^\ ^] ^^ and ^_, respectively. Of course, most text editors will interpret those keys as something else. In emacs you can enter them literally by using C-q (quote) first.

Since we're kind of talking about things from an I18N perspective, those characters are written like this on a bog standard Swedish keyboard:

    \ is AltGr+?
    ] is AltGr+9
    ^ is Shift+^, then space
    _ is Shift+-

AltGr is the right Alt key, to the right of the space bar.

So none of those are single keys, which means that combining them with Ctrl to write control characters becomes almost comically difficult. Not very accessible to typical users, I'd say.

Actually \ is AltGr++, i.e. "+" is the symbol you get from that key without any modifier. With shift you get ? and with AltGr you get \. My bad, and too late to edit.

Just thinking out loud here, but isn't part of the point is that they are not keyboard characters. If they're on the keyboard, then they will pop up in ordinary text, similar to the | (pipe) character and friends.

While XLSX is proprietary by descent, it is standardized; thus, it's readable/writable by man and machine alike (essentially a zipped XML with some bells and whistles). I have not encountered a less broken format that is similarly widespread.

I don't think that's common knowledge, although I have unzipped a .xlsx file in the past to inspect the contents. Works on .docx files too.

P.S. Aren't .xlsx files subject to the same problem as the .csv?

Well, some of the issues are shared between CSV and XLSX. However, it does have a clear distinction between structure (which also can be validated!) and content (which moots the issue with comma-semicolon-tab separation), a well-defined character set and somewhat-sane character escaping rules.

It does have similar "executability" issues as CSV (and more), but 1. the formula evaluation is documented and expected behavior, 1b. there is a documented way to suppress it, and 2. programs reading it are aware that security is a thing, and either a) constrain/sandbox it (in the case of table processors such as MSOffice or LibreOffice), or b) don't execute its macros and expansions at all (in the case of libraries such as PhpExcel). Not sure about the Google Docs issue.

(As far as "common knowledge" - knowledge for manual inspection of strings is IMNSHO not required, all that's needed is that it's program-readable; in this respect, most table processors are capable of this. The point "but you can inspect CSVs by hand" comes from experience: it is also possible to inspect binaries by hand, neither of these is intuitive, both are a learned skill)

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