#theodi

JeniT: ﾬ separated values?

¬ separated values

WAT

hah, tested that the other day

if the NHS are only releasing mangled data, then maybe I should feel more comfortable ;)

Well, it's better than unicode pile of poo separated values

LOL

I tried adjusting the separator using the form and it broke

Yeah, I tried that too

its probably an encoding bug

the validation page is only displaying because I put in a change to force the encoding to utf-8 for the samples

there's probably other issues

JeniT: I found a nice example the other day that had fields that were triple quoted

yes, could be an encoding issue in the file

"""my data"""

ldodds: yes, I've seen one like that

weirdly open office removed 2 sets of quotes, but left one

something on gov.uk

its always something on gov.uk :)

that's not weird, it's correct behaviour

the outer "s are the escaping of the field

doh, yes

the ""s are escaped double quotes

I do not think there is an end to the oddness in CSVs

the CSV on the Web WG want to dive right into it

which I fear may be mad

I preferred your more sensible option (a new thing)

mmm

I'll have to discuss with Dan how to make sure it doesn't completely run away

i actually think that the way csvs do escaping makes a lot of sense

Your two scoping questions are the key decisions I think

its pretty much " instead of \ with a couple extra rules for edge cases

there's a lot of wild and woolly delimited formats

ogd: I was given some CSV with back-slash escaped quotes the other day. Someone didn't get the memo :)

looking at http://standards.data.gov.uk/proposal/sharing-c... there are people arguing for TSV instead of CSV because then you avoid escaping

which of course you don't

yes, I've encountered that misconception too

escaping is for newlines too, not just delimiters

I suspect that this logic is what led the NHS to use ¬ as a delimiter ;)

ogd: right

XML and JSON I can get, but CSV and Excel I have to sign-up to access

ogd: btw, any updates on csvconf?

ldodds: that's your freemium business model right there ;)

lol

JeniT: still working out logistics, okfest originally promised me a venue in berlin but then had to cancel last month

ogd: argh, still planning to be in Berlin around OKFest though?

JeniT: yea hopefully, i have been swamped with dat development and was gonna try and lock in all the details when i ship

ok :)