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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know where there's never been some effort to create a "CSV format specification"

RFC 4180 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180) "Common Format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files"

That's not exactly what I mean; that's just one of many different CSV variants (and just because it's an RFC doesn't make it "official" either). What I mean is something like:

  $ cat file.csv
  CSV,quote=always,quotechar=",header=yes,delim=,
  Col1,Col2
  "val","val2"
  [..]

Then you always know what you're dealing with, unambiguously.

There are other cases where embedding some "metadata" in CSV files is useful; for example the exports I create in my app are versioned by prefixing the first header with the version number. It works, but it's not exactly great.

Of course, the downside is legacy software not being able to process it.

There are CSV specs - see https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/csv-dialect/ and https://github.com/csvspecs , for example. Note: Both initiatives are ongoing and alive and kicking. The trouble is almost nobody cares - as your ignorance shows - just complaining and playing the know-it-all is so much easier and more fun, isn't?

You seem like a nice person. Want to be friends?

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