Which delimiter should be used for lists of values inside a CSV file?

Quotes around the item is for this 123, hello, "a, b, c, d", 29.

This was one of the possibilities I considered. I think commas are the most logical internal delimiter. The only downside is that this approach may make the CSV file confusing to look at.

– Rafe Aug 19 '09 at 14:21 No-one is ever looking at CSV's (in the raw format) are they? Something like excel will break it out appropriately (well, pending bugs, which it has had). – Noon Silk Aug 19 '09 at 14:26 This is the solution I went with.

– Rafe Sep 4 '09 at 4:42.

I always liked the TAB character as a separator - works well when importing into Excel too.

It depends largely on the values you are trying to separate. For example, if you're expecting numeric values, it would be unwise to use comma or period as your delimiter. Same goes if the values expect hashes.

Or pipes Use a character that has the least possibility of being used in the content. To do this, you might want to analyze your data first so you can easily decide what delimiter to use.

Ofcourse, it depends on data! – Janis Veinbergs Aug 19 '09 at 5:18 It depends on the data but I was hoping there was some kind of convention ... – Rafe Aug 19 '09 at 14:22.

Pipes with quotes as text qualifiers have worked best for me. It makes it easier to read when you open the data file in NotePad++ too.

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