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Comment by galleywest200 | Hacker News Reader

It is simply easier to take basic written human text and put it into a TSV than a CSV as humans use commas far more than tabs. You can replace a TAB with spaces and keep things legible but replacing a comma in a sentence can literally change the meaning.

Maybe you could wrap everything in quotation marks but that is ugly.

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It's not easier or simpler since you need the exact same checks and steps, just with a different delimiter. It doesn't matter if you need to do them less times for certain inputs since you need the same checks, the same encoding/decoding steps and so on.

Do you think you would have an easier time writing a TSV parser than a CSV one? If so, why?

And wrapping in quotes does not solve anything since now you need to both check for escaped quotes and tabs/commas. It's the same but one level deeper.

I think what they're saying is that with some minor control over the data in your dataset, you don't need to care about escaping _in your parser_ at all. The same might be said of CSV but I would argue that in the majority of situations tabs are less semantically meaningful than commas and newlines, so it is generally fine just to strip them out.

Obviously this is not robust solution, but in cases I've seen, it works adequately. If one were to be doing it "the right way" then I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I get what you are saying, but my point is that is not CSV or TSV. It's a homemade format with its own rules that just happens to be inspired by TSV or CSV.

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