Talk:Comma-separated values/Archives/2022/October

Theres something wrong with either this article or, MS Excel and OOo Calc

I am creating a .csv file and one of my fields has a comma in it. Naturally I put enclosing parenthesis around it so that the comma does mess anything up. But, it is messing it up and the second part of the data in that field is in another field. Here is one line of the file:

Filename, Line Number, Developer, Date, Length, Version Added
attrs.c, 336, jsmiff, "Feb 17, 2006", 146, 1.1

Its messing up on the "Feb 17, 2006" data entry. Does anybody know how to deal with this. I can't understand :( Luxophage 17:14, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, remove the space before "Feb 17, 2006". The double quote must follow the comma immediately to be considered as an escape character. Just follow the RFC mentioned in the Article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.56.171.65 (talk) 14:54, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

This illustrates the pitfall of the RFC, which gave semantic meaning to spaces, and tried to formalize CSV as a machine format, while CSV is primarily a human-editable and human-readable format. CSV should have been formalized as a language, and CSV would have had a chance of not remaining the mess of dialects it is today... 86.194.93.118 (talk) 13:28, 25 October 2022 (UTC)