Stop this horrible genre now! As discussed in the recent video programming post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259686), this neither helps the beginner because it is unnecessarily overwhelming, nor the expert because he has already read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 and is aware of these problems with bad CSV parsers/emitters. In the intermediate case, it could be useful for someone maintaining a CSV parser or emitter who is not aware of a few of these points and wants 100% compatibility with all CSV parsers/emitters in existence, but the list style is confusing grammatically and offers no counterexamples or suggestions for improvement.
With that said, if you are interested in using CSV for encoding and decoding in your own environment, I suggest a new file standard called μTSV.
1. All μTSV files are UTF-8.
2. All values are delimited by "\t", and all lines must end with "\n" (including the last one).
3. If you want to use a "\t" or "\n" character in your value, tough luck---use JSON.
I mostly just thought it was fun to write. Put my pain down on a page, get a little bit of catharsis. I actually had written out some "counterexamples or suggestions" but decided to keep it terse and with the general style of the other similar posts.
I was not aware of the scorn for the style, I just knew I enjoy reading them.
As opposed to your μTSV may I suggest DSV. The Art of Unix Programming makes a strong case for how it's superior to CSV [1]
1. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s02.html#id2...
Heh, by coincidence, I had recently written two posts about DSV, and had mentioned the same TAOUP DSV link you gave above:
Processing DSV data (Delimiter-Separated Values) with Python:
https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/11/processing-dsv-data-delim...
The example program in the post lets you use either a "-c delimiter_char" or a "-n delimiter_ASCII_code" to specify the delimiter for your DSV data being processed by it.
and
[xtopdf] Publish DSV data (Delimiter-Separated Values) to PDF:
https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/xtopdf-publish-dsv-data-d...