TPSV, an Alternative to TSV (and CSV)

For multiline cell contents, there is rule 7, the multi line extension. Newlines are not allowed in cells otherwise, because of rule 2, it's a line based format.

I personally use it to write tabular data manually, used to define our datamodel. Because this format is editor agnostic, colleagues can easily read and edit as well. So in my case it's focus on human read/write and machine read.

Now sure about "we" but I have used these for years in personal projects for own purposes.

          Dec      Octal  Hex   Binary

          028      034    01C   00011100       FS    (File Separator)
          029      035    01D   00011101       GS    (Group Separator)
          030      036    01E   00011110       RS    (Request to Send)(Record Separator)
          031      037    01F   00011111       US    (Unit Separator)

Not sure if satire, or not. Just in case of not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_groups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#C0_con...

Well there's JSONL which is used heavily in scientific programs (especially in biology)

But CSV represented as JSON is usually accomplished like so:

  {
    "headers": ["name", "habitat", "food"],
    "data": [
      ["Acorn Woodpecker", "forest", "grain"],
      ["American Goldfinch", "grassland", "grain"],
      ["Anhinga", "wetland", "fish"],
      ["Australian Reed Warbler", "wetland", "grub"],
      ["Black Vulture", "forest", null]
    ]
  }

S-expressions?

Yeah :) Though I can think of two reasons why: it's not typable for most people on a keyboard, and most programs are not designed to deal with it, or render it properly in an aligned way, like tab characters.

I don't think popularizing these ASCII characters would solve the problem in its entirety.

If RS and US were in common use, there would be a need to have a visible representation for them in the terminal, and a way to enter RS on the keyboard. Pretty soon, strings that contain RS would become much more common in the wild.

Then, one day somebody would need to store one of those strings in a table, and there would be no way to do so without escaping.

I do think that having RS display in the terminal (like a newline followed by some graphic?) and using it would be an improvement over TSV's use of newline for this purpose, but considering that it's not a perfect solution, I can understand why people are not overly motivated to make this happen. The time for this may have been 40+ years ago when a standard for how to display or type it would be feasible to agree upon.

I did an ETL project for an ERP system that used these separators years ago. It was ridiculously easy because I didn't have to worry about escaping. Parsing was an easy state machine.

Notepad++ handles the display and entry of these characters fairly easily. I think they're nowhere as unergonomic as people say they are.

I’m pretty sure part of the intent is that it should be easy to write (type) in this format. Separator characters are not that. Depending on the editor, they’re not especially readable either.

Thanks :)

The spec says the last cell does not need to end in a tab, so this would be two cells IMO

I think spec tries and fails to translate code implementation into human language. In code cell separator is `\t|`.

What does it make worse exactly?

> We need binary formats. In this era we are capable for it.

We have them, they're used where appropriate.

> Throw away the text formats.

I would argue that _most_ of the time tsv or csv are used it's because either:

a) the lowest common denominator for interchange. Oh, you don't have _my specific version of $program? How about I give you the data in csv? _everything_ can read that...

b) a human is expected to inspect/view/adjust the data and they'd be using a bin -> text tool anyways. The move to binary based log formats (`journald`) is still somewhat controversial. It would have been a non-starter if the tooling to make the binary "readable" wasn't on-par with (or, in a few cases, better!) than the contemporary text based tooling we've been used to for the prior 30+ years..

Text is universally accessible and widely supported. Binary has it's benefits, but human facing, it has to be text.

Which formats are helpful can depend on the use. I think DER (which is a binary format) is not so bad (although I added a few additional types (such as key/value list, BCD string, and TRON string), but not all uses are required to use them). I had also made up Multi-DER, which is simply any number of DER concatenated together (there are formats of JSON like that too). (I had also made up TER which is a text format and a program to convert TER to DER. I also wrote a program to convert JSON to DER. It would also be possible to convert CSV, etc.)

It was also my idea of an operating system design, it will have a binary format used for most stuff, similar to DER but different in some ways (including different types are available), which is intended to be interoperable among most of the programs on the system.

The idea that binary formats are the way because "you're going to use a program to interact with the format anyway" ignores the network effects of having things like text editors and unix commands that handle text as a universal intermediate, while having bespoke programs for every format dooms you to developing a full set of tooling for every format (or more likely, writing code that converts the binary format to text formats).

More recently though, consider that LLMs are terrible at emitting binary files, but amazing at emitting text. I can have a GPT spit out a nice diagram in Mermaid, or create calendar entries from a photo of an event program in ical format.

Yep, and stuff it into a sqlite db too you have a query interface all built.

Binary formats are generally poorly defined, buggy as hell and have limited tooling that can deal with them. Also, they're not human readable so when you inevitably hit a problem with a binary format, you can't just eyeball it to see that you've got an "O'Connor" in the names.

Data will always outlive the program that originally produced it.

This is why you should almost always use text formats.

CSV is also a display format for humans and also for computers. Its also a terrible one because its too variable FS is variable, escapes could exist, "" could be used, this slows down parsing.