CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Role and Limits of CSV

  • Many see CSV as an “ancient, lowest-common-denominator” text format that persists because it’s simple, human-inspectable, and widely supported.
  • Others stress that CSV itself is “kinda great” when used per RFC 4180; the real problem is ad‑hoc dialects and badly tested exporters/importers.
  • Several note that non-technical users equate “CSV” with “whatever Excel does,” which drives inconsistent, often broken files.

DSV / ASCII Control-Character Delimiters

  • The proposed DSV idea (using ASCII control characters like 30/31 as field/record delimiters) avoids quoting and newline edge cases.
  • Supporters like that it’s efficient to parse, solves many CSV escaping issues, and builds on long-existing ASCII concepts.
  • Critics say it sacrifices the main CSV benefit (human readability/editability in generic tools) without offering enough in return.
  • Others note practical issues: these characters do appear in some real-world “CSV” containing binary/non-plain-text data; you still need an escape strategy.

Standards, Dialects, and Pragmatism

  • One camp argues strongly for enforcing RFC 4180 and rejecting broken CSV to reduce chaos and improve interoperability.
  • Another camp counters that “broken” is a sliding scale; power asymmetries mean small suppliers must accept whatever large partners send.
  • RFC 4180 itself advises being liberal in what you accept; there’s debate over whether that helps standardization or entrenches sloppiness.

Alternatives and Tooling

  • For data you control and don’t need to edit by hand, people recommend Parquet, SQLite files, JSON/NDJSON, or other structured/binary formats.
  • TSV is popular for command-line work; seen as simpler and safer than CSV, though still fragile if tabs appear in data.
  • Some suggest augmenting CSV with a standardized metadata header (delimiter, encoding, locale, etc.).
  • Tooling quality matters: libraries like pandas, xsv, zsv, and LibreOffice Calc are praised for handling messy CSV better than Excel or naive parsers.
  • Several conclude that any format needs clear escaping rules and that “just pick another delimiter” does not by itself solve the deeper interchange problems.