Re: More than you ever wanted to know about csv files (Re: to csv or not to csv)

[John Denker <jsd av8n com>]

On 10/18/20 5:56 PM, Morten Welinder wrote:

> Nope, but they are all "csv" files.   I understand that you would
> prefer those files to have
> been named something else by suitably educated users, but that is not
> the world we are
> living in.

No, that is not the correct understanding.
That is not what I prefer.

At the conceptual level, there are formats.
Formats have names.

Files also have names.
Sometimes the format can be inferred from the filename,
and sometimes it can't.

Unix scripts, for example, can have many different formats,
and can have any filename whatsoever, with no extension, or
even a misleading extension.  For example, a shell script
could have a .pl extension.  You have to look at the hashbang
to figure out what's going on.

We all know that you cannot figure out the format of a .csv
file by looking at the filename.

For that matter, gnumeric can read from fd://0 with no filename
at all.

My point is that we need a way of talking about formats that is
independent of the filename.