Well, it sometimes seems to be hard to write a short posting. ;-)

My point is that CSV exists and is successful because there are tons of code writing and reading CSV, and they won't go away any time soon.

Another advantage of CSV is that the tabular data is also represented as a table. Each table line is a line in the file, and columns are separated by a character. (That's the C and S in CSV, duh!) And while you could format JSON (or XML) in the same way, you don't have to. That breaks tools like cut, paste, join, sort, uniq, that all assume tabular data being layed out as explained.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re^11: Complex file manipulation challenge by afoken
in thread Complex file manipulation challenge by jdporter

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