There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. “Oh, XML,” they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. “We use JSON now. Much cleaner.”
I love XML, when it is properly utilized. Which, in most cases, it is not, unfortunately.
JSON > CSV though, I fucking hate CSV. I do not get the appeal. “It’s easy to handle” – NO, it is not. It’s the “fuck whoever needs to handle this” of file “formats”.
JSON is a reasonable middle ground, I’ll give you that
CSV >>> JSON when dealing with large tabular data:
1 can be solved with JSONL, but 2 is unavoidable.
{ "columns": ["id", "name", "age"], "rows": [ [1, "bob", 44], [2, "alice", 7], ... ] }There ya go, problem solved without the unparseable ambiguity of CSV
Please stop using CSV.
No:
Just user Zarr or so for array data. A table with more than 200 rows isn’t ”human readable” anyway.
Yes…but compression
And with csv you just gotta pray that you’re parser parses the same as their writer…and that their writer was correctly implemented…and they set the settings correctly
Compression adds another layer of complexity for parsing.
JSON can also have configuration mismatch problems. Main one that comes to mind is case (in)sensitivity for keys.
Nahh your nitpicking there, large csvs are gonna be compressed anyways
In practice I’ve never met a Json I cant parse, every second csv is unparseable
Biggest problem is, CSV is not a standardized format like JSON. For very simple cases it could be used as a database like format. But it depends on the parser and that’s not ideal.
Exactly. I’ve seen so much data destroyed silently deep in some bioinformatics pipeline due to this that I’ve just become an anti CSV advocate.
Use literally anything else that doesn’t need out of band “I’m using this dialect” information that has to match to prevent data loss.