Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

Is there a text format like TSV/CSV that can represent nested/repeating sub-structures?

We have YAML but it's too complex. JSON is rather verbose with all the repeated keys and quoting, XML even moreso. I'd also like to see a 'schema tree' corresponding to a header row in TSV/CSV. I'd even be fine with a binary format with standard decoding to see the plain-text contents. Something for XML like what MessagePack does for JSON would work, since we already have schema specifications.

Well there's JSONL which is used heavily in scientific programs (especially in biology)

But CSV represented as JSON is usually accomplished like so:

  {
    "headers": ["name", "habitat", "food"],
    "data": [
      ["Acorn Woodpecker", "forest", "grain"],
      ["American Goldfinch", "grassland", "grain"],
      ["Anhinga", "wetland", "fish"],
      ["Australian Reed Warbler", "wetland", "grub"],
      ["Black Vulture", "forest", null]
    ]
  }

S-expressions?

Greenspun's Tenth Corollary:

Every textual data format that is not originally S-expressions eventually devolves into an informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of S-expressions.

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