Peter Corlett <ab...@cabal.org.uk> writes:
> On 29 Apr 2010, at 12:09, David Cantrell wrote:
> [...]
>> Last time I had to use SOAP, the libraries in use at either end couldn't
>> handle some data structures we needed. The solution? CSV, uuencoded,
>> as a blob in SOAP.
>
> Blimey, your SOAP implementations must have been bad if CSV was an
> improvement.
>
> I mean, is it CR, CRLF or LF-terminated, mandatory-quoted, minimally-quoted
> or some other rules? How are quotes encoded? Is the text encoded in Latin-1,
> Windows-1252, Unicode or some perverse Mac encoding? Can one embed a
> newline, and does it stay as CR/CRLF/LF or be canonicalised?
>
> And that's just the variants that are transparent enough to not subtly
> corrupt your data.
Ah, you forgot the most precious "feature" of CSV files, or perhaps of the
Microsoft Excel tool most often used to process them:
If your first two bytes are ASCII "ID", and depending on your platform case
insensitively, Excel decides the content is a SYLK format file and refuses to
load it.
Endless fun in dealing with data interchange!
Daniel
--
X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain
greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money.
-- The Unix Haters Handbook
