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"POSSIBLE DATA LOSS" (Excel reports, when you save a CSV) (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/rant@lemmy.sdf.org
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Yeah, I get it... the formatting goes away... why so alarmist? And is the formatting really "data" anyway?

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[–] 3 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

I’m a web developer that lets people export to CSV and quoting things is usually the answer. Though for a number with a comma in it I’d rather not quote it and leave it as a bare integer/decimal so that the data type is correctly inferred.

Speaking of, I have a handful of hacks I do specifically for Excel so that it infers types correctly — it needs more prodding than other applications importing CSV.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, CSV is an archaic data format that lacks a lot of important nuances; like understanding that not everything is done the same way everywhere around the world.

    I guess one viable alternative would be to use tabs for delimiting the data, since (afaik) tabs are not commonly found in normal spreadsheet data (I admit that I could be wrong).

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    I’ve messed with both. But yeah, keeping an international mind is best. Separators are really unnecessary for data transfer so I usually just exclude them.

    One quirk I remember for Excel to recognize a date it has to be YYYY-MM-DD 12:00 PM because it doesn’t understand ISO-8601. 😓

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