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0 pointsnomel1y ago0 comments

Remove the [] characters and you've invented CSV with excel style quoting.

0 comments

Almost, except the way Excel-style quoting works with newlines sucks - you end up with rows that span multiple lines, so you can't split on newline to get individual rows.

With JSON those new lines are \n characters which are much easier to work with.

magicalhippo1y ago

I ended up parsing the XML format instead of the CSV format when handling paste from Excel due to the newlines issue.

CSV seemed so simple but after numerous issues, a cell with both newline and " made me realize I should keep the little hair I had left and put in the work to parse the XML.

It's not great either, with all its weird tags, but at least it's possible to parse reliably.

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