Why isn’t there an honest file format for tabular information?

Tabular information is in all places. I help studying and writing tabular information in varied codecs in all 3 of my software program software. It is a vital a part of my data transformation software. However all of the tabular information codecs suck. There doesn’t appear to be something that’s moderately house environment friendly, easy and fast to parse and textual content primarily based (not binary) so you’ll be able to view and edit it with a regular editor.

Most tabular information presently will get exchanged as: CSV, Tab separated, XML, JSON or Excel. And they’re all extremely sub-optimal for the job.

CSV is a multitude. One quote within the mistaken place and the file is invalid. It’s tough to parse effectively utilizing a number of cores, because of the quoting (you’ll be able to’t begin parsing from half means by means of a file). Completely different quoting schemes are in use. You don’t know what encoding it’s in. Use of separators and line endings are inconsistent (typically comma, typically semicolon). Writing a parser to deal with all of the totally different dialects is under no circumstances trivial. Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers don’t even agree on the best way to interpret some edge circumstances for CSV.

Tab separated is a bit higher than CSV. However can’t retailer tabs and nonetheless has points with line endings, encodings and so on.

XML and JSON are tree buildings and never appropriate for effectively storing tabular information (plus different points).

There may be Parquet. It is extremely environment friendly with it’s columnar storage and compression. However it’s binary, so can’t be considered or edited with commonplace instruments, which is a ache.

Don’t even get me began on Excel’s proprietary, ghastly binary format.

Why can’t we’ve got a format the place:

• Encoding is at all times UTF-8
• Values saved in row main order (row 1, row2 and so on)
• Columns are separated by u001F (ASCII unit separator)
• Rows are separated by u001E (ASCII report separator)
• Er, that’s your complete specification.

No escaping. If you wish to put u001F or u001E in your information – robust you’ll be able to’t. Use a unique format.

It could be moderately compact, environment friendly to parse and simple to manually edit (Notepad++ reveals the unit separator as a ‘US’ image). You can write a quick parser for it in minutes. Typing u001F or u001E in some editors is likely to be a faff, however it’s hardly a showstopper.

It could possibly be known as one thing like “unicode separated worth” (hat tip to @fakeunicode on Twitter for the identify) or “unit separated worth” with file extension .usv. Possibly a unique extension might used when values are saved in column main order (column1, column 2 and so on).

Is there nothing like this already? Possibly there may be and I simply haven’t heard of it. If not, shouldn’t there be?

And sure I’m conscious of the related XKCD cartoon ( https://xkcd.com/927/ ).

** Edit 4-Might-2022 **

“Javascript” -> “JSON” in para 5.

It has been pointed on the above provides you with a single line of textual content in an editor, which isn’t nice for human readability. A fast repair for this is able to be to make the report delimiter a u001E character adopted by an LF character. Any LF that comes instantly after an u001E can be ignored when parsing. Any LF not instantly after an u001E is a part of the info. I don’t find out about different editors, however it’s simple to view and edit in Notepad++.