A love letter to the CSV format

A love letter to the CSV format Or why people pretending CSV is dead are wrong Every month or so, a new blog article declaring the near demise of CSV in favor of some "obviously superior" format (parquet, newline-delimited JSON, MessagePack records etc.) find its ways to the reader's eyes. Sadly those articles often offer a very narrow and biased comparison and often fail to understand what makes CSV a seemingly unkillable staple of data serialization. It is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths. 1. CSV is dead simple The specification of CSV holds in its title: "comma separated values". Okay, it's a lie, but still, the specification holds in a tweet and can be explained to anybody in ... Read full article.