(skeletor is leading by example by adding that unnecessary apostrophe…)

  • dan@upvote.au
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    8 months ago

    There’s no formal spec for CSV. The RFC you mentioned describes the most common behaviour observed in many implementations, but it’s not a spec itself, as mentioned on the second page:

    While there are various specifications and implementations for the CSV format (for ex. [4], [5], [6] and [7]), there is no formal specification in existence, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations of CSV files. This section documents the format that seems to be followed by most implementations:

    Also, my understanding is that double quotes are only used for strings. Commas can appear outside of strings, for example in numbers in countries that use them as a decimal point. That’s actually why many implementations use semicolons or tabs as the separator.