Talk:Delimiter-separated values

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

This article was on votes for deletion, the consensus was to keep it. See the archived discussion for further details.

Way Oversimplified

This is scandalously oversimplified. No one here actually working in computer science? Just dilettantes hanging about, right? See Eric Raymond for an excellent treatise on this subject. There is a huge difference between clumsy Microsoft technologies such as CSV and TSV on the one hand and the elegant DSV of Unix on the other. Microsoft's abominable CSV is not repeat not a DSV. Get back to work.

Suggested merge

Delimited has more links to it, but I don't like the idea of a past tense word for the article name. Plinth molecular gathered 15:10, 7 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merge to "delimiter." Right now "delimited" looks the higher quality article, but "delimiter" is more consistent with the way articles are named on Wikipedia. Assuming "delimiter" doesn't say anything "delimited" doesn't say better, it might be a simple matter of replacing the text of "delimiter" with that of "delimited" and turning "delimited" into a redirect. Anton Mravcek 18:53, 7 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

DSV is a standard. It's a Unix standard. It doesn't want to be called delimited or delimiter. You've heard of Unix?

rename to Delimiter-separated values

this article should probably be renamed with the dash, since it is a compound adjective. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dreftymac (talk • contribs) .

Done. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:44, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stop hyphenating everything. It's a disease. Compound adjective? Where'd you find that? lolz —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.50.44.156 (talk) 19:02, 20 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

escaping of delimiters etc

Might be useful to have some mention of other solutions to delimiter escaping, e.g. CSV can deal with embedded delimiters (comma) and embedded escapes (double-quote)

Quotes

Why are the entries in the example quoted? There seems no reason for this.

Why are you even here? You obviously have no clue what this subject is about. Why are you here? Why?

RFC

One may mention that CSV is a part of RFC http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt --Csmth (talk) 07:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I am wrong. This article is not specific for CSV. Ignore my comment. --Csmth (talk) 08:04, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is "Delimiter" the same as "Separator" now?

It seems that “delimiter” has come to be synonymous with “separator”, but this is not how I learned it. Back when I was taking computer science classes, delimiters were used to mark the start and end of something. For example, a quotation uses delimiters. If you see something like, "it fell from the sky", the quoted text is delimited. A double-quote marks the beginning, and another double-quote marks the end. So delimiters set the boundaries of the thing being delimited.

If this were still true, you could not call a file of comma-separated values format (or CSV) a comma-delimited file. Technically, I would argue it is not comma-delimited, it is comma-separated. By contrast, files that conform to a text markup language, like SGML or XML, are delimited in that the beginning and end of chunks of text are marked by start and end tags.

<rant>I don’t mean to be pedantic, but this is delimited.</rant> Spoodles (talk) 21:16, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree. As a programmer "delimiter separated" sounds oxymoronic. Some examples:

- delimited: "This is delimited with quotes." - separated: This,is,separated,with,commas. - both: "This","is","both","delimited","and","separated."

A third way is with terminators:

- terminated: this;is;terminated;with;semicolons;

Perhaps the confusion comes from Microsoft's misuse of the term delimiter in Microsoft Excel (in 2003 anyway) when loading character separated data. They refer to the *separators* as 'delimiters'. Where delimiters are used - which they can be if the individual values might contain the separate character - they refer to the delimiters using the term 'text qualifier'.

62.232.250.50 (talk) 11:04, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ads in the article?

Data validation tools like Flat File Checker may be used to identify and eliminate such errors before import. - Looks like advertisement of the above tool. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.200.67.50 (talk) 10:33, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]