Why do we keep using CSV?

Posted by Stephen on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Stephen
Published on 2011-02-14T21:35:24Z Indexed on 2011/02/14 23:34 UTC
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Productivity

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best-practices

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ethics

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belongs-on-stack-overflow

Why do we keep using CSV?

I recently made a shift to working the health domain and despite the wonderful work in data transfer standards, all data transfer is in CSV, both for reporting to external organisations, and for data migrations when implementing new systems.

Unfortunately the use of CSV is the cause of the endless repetition of the same stupid errors, with the same waste of developer time. (bad escaping, failing to handle null fields etc.)

I know we can do better, and anything between JSON and XML (depending on the instance) would be fine. (Most of the time this is data going from one MS SQLserver 2005 to another!)

I feel as if each time I see this happening I am literally watching one developer waste anothers time.

So why do we keep shafting each other? When will we stop?

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