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TSV --> Problem Solved! Has anyone ever stumbled upon a cell entry that needed to contain an actual tab character? No!!! The tab character's entire raison-d'etre is to separate fields, whereas the comma separates words. Technically the "C" in CSV denotes "Character" but with TSV the intent is 100% clear. The MIME type is explicit: "Note that fields that contain tabs are not allowable in this encoding." This is a vanishingly small price to pay for a parser a simple as split("\t")...

[1] http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separat...



What problem is solved, exactly? How do you parse the messy CSV file you've been handed, in order to convert it to TSV?


My point is simply that TSVs are just as straightforward as CSVs but suffer none of the issues. So why are we not making TSVs to begin with?


Nobody (or very few people) processing CSVs is doing it because they like them. You do it because that's how someone else created the data - someone you don't have any control over, like a government agency, financial institution, piece of obscure software, whatever.




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