Ronald Duncan

More expressions of the same idea: https://www.ccsv.io/ And this perennial favorite here at HN: https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-… I've been toying with the idea of starting a change.org campaign, asking Microsoft to add support to Excel for importing and exporting such files. I don't see any way to make any progress if Microsoft won't push the industry forward.

More tools should use the ASCII unit and field separator characters intended for this purpose: https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

Replying to myself, because after reviewing other comments I realized I didn't read the linked post thoroughly enough. Near the end he proposes a format called "usv", basically using the control codes (unit separator \u001f and record separator \u001e) built into ASCII and now Unicode for their intended purpose, which is actually a really good idea! Apparently this had been noted earlier as a format called "adt"[0]. [0]https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we actually used ASCII as it was designed? Oct Dec Hex Char ---------------------------------------- 034 28 1C FS (file separator) 035 29 1D GS (group separator) 036 30 1E RS (record separator) 037 31 1F US (unit separator) https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

This is why I switched to TSV. The risks are too high. (Yes, I know about ASCII delimiters, but IMHO /t and /n are good enough for numbers-first files, especially considering how most keyboards don't feature the aforementioned delimiters, and hardly anyone has even heard of them.) https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

“Any file is a database if you awk hard enough.” —Bryan Horstmann-Allen https://twitter.com/neilkod/status/914217352564137984 Furthermore, no thread on CSV files can be complete without mentioning this infamous bit of fact-trolling: the ASCII standard has had unit- and record-delimiters baked into it from the beginning. https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

CSV could be much easier to parse if people use the ASCII codes meant to be used as field and line separators, thus avoiding having problems with commas. See https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-…

I really wish ASCII delimited text didn't die off. https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600 But, it suffered from not having designated keys on common keyboards, therefore it wasn't obviously necessary for plain text editors to support. Meanwhile, everyone uses plain text editors for everything --even if it means jumping through hoops full of exceptions and corner cases to pretend they can handle more than plain text.