Lack of A Standard
The name "CSV" indicates the use of the comma to separate data fields. Nevertheless, the term "CSV" is widely used to refer a large family of formats, which differ in many ways. For example, many so-called "CSV" files in fact use the tab character instead of comma (such files can be more precisely referred to as "TSV" for tab separated values); some allow or require single or double quotation marks around some or all fields; and some reserve the very first record for a list of field names.
A particular problem is that in some countries, it is very common to write the decimal point as a comma instead of period. For example, pi would be written as 3,14159. This makes the comma a poor choice for field-separator in many locales. Other implementation differences include handling of more commonplace field separators (such as space or semicolon) and newline characters inside text fields.
Such lack of standardization can cause problems for data exchange based on so-called "CSV" files. One solution is to rely on a standard, such as that proposed by RFC 4180. The more common but technically less satisfactory solution is to rely on human intervention: because CSV files are plain text, humans can view and diagnose most common variants using a text editor.
Read more about this topic: Comma-separated Values
Famous quotes containing the words lack of a, lack of, lack and/or standard:
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Lack of patience in small matters can create havoc in great ones.”
—Chinese proverb.
Confucian Analects.
“Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“... the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)