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Comment by ddulaney

I think the issue is that CSV parsing is really easy to screw up. You mentioned delimiter choice and escaping, and I’d add header presence/absence to that list.

There are at least 3 knobs to turn every time you want to parse a CSV file. There’s reasonably good tooling around this (for example, Python’s CSV module has 8 parser parameters that let you select stuff), but the fact that you have to worry about these details is itself a problem.

You said “handling data is complicated as much as the world itself is”, and I 100% agree. But the really hard part is understanding what the data means, what it describes. Every second spent on figuring out which CSV parsing option I have to change could be better spent actually thinking about the data.

parent ddulaney 1 year ago

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