Morning, everyone!
I'm sure everyone has had a situation where they were generating data for another system, and needed a text format, and decided that comma-separated values (CSV) would work nicely. Well, here's a little advice: if you have any reason to expect a) human-driven input for fields, or b) reformatting of fields by some programatic means, then chose to use a pipe '|' as the separator instead.
The reason is that there is little use for that character in normal human text usage, so it will not get used within a field, the way commas often are in things like addresses, or names. And as I found out recently, some encryption software is perfectly happy producing cyphertext with commas embedded
No comments:
Post a Comment