What about creating a hierarchical CSV standard?

Posted by Andy Brice
Jul 21, 2024 at 08:06 PM

Speaking as a software developer who has written CSV parsers, CSV is a farly horrible format, for all sorts of reasons, including:

-loosely defined standard (e.g. doesn’t specify text encoding)
-difficult to parse multi threaded due to ‘escaping’
-a single wrongly placed quote can corrupt everything afterwards
-no provision for comments or meta data

It has also been poorly implemented in many apps.

It’s one saving grace is that you can easily edit it with a standard text editor.

It is pretty easy to define hierarchical relations in any tabular format, including CSV. Just have a unique ID for each row and use to reference child and/or parent rows. Whichever is more convenient. I don’t see any real need for a standard.