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0 pointsechlebek9y ago0 comments

That's adorable! CSV is notoriously loose, has a bajillion edge cases, differs wildly on region, and is not even really a format at all. Basically nobody follows RFC 4180, nor does anyone care about its existence.

The other day I had to fix a bug in our CSV importer; it turns out that when you install Excel, it changes the mimetype of CSV files from 'text/csv' to 'application/vnd-ms.excel' system wide. Wow! These sorts of shenanigans are never ending in the futile endeavour to support CSV.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

douche9y ago· 1 in thread

Installing excel does heinous things. I try to keep my csvs opening in notepad++ to avoid corruption

eropple9y ago

Your translator/localizer, if you have one, probably uses Excel already. I personally prefer to have fewer moving parts in my stack, so I don't really think it makes much sense to make their life harder just to have something else.

benchaney9y ago

That seems like a serious issue with excel. I don't really see how that is an problem with CSV as a format.

metaobject9y ago

It seems that you're letting the behavior of a particular application and OS negatively affect your opinion of a technology which works really well on different platforms.

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