There is no specification for CSV, which is why it’s such a mess and different parsers and renderers have wildly different features. The closest thing to a spec is RFC4180 but that RFC simply describes the most common features across several CSV implementations, and is not actually a spec.
I agree that it should be comma separated though. My understanding is that it caused issues in countries that use a comma as a decimal point.
Also, Excel sometimes uses tabs rather than commas or semicolons.
Using comma would probably caused more problems as it is a decimal separator for those languages.
My excel also uses semicolon in formulas instead of comma when separating parameters. Some VBA scripts break when using different language settings and some forumilas don’t translate automatically to different locale so they just give an error. Overall using excel in different locale setups is annoying.
Best separator I have used is | as i have never seen it in the data as an input. Comma and semicolon both have caused issues in the past for me as they might pop up at wrong places.
CSVs are supposed be comma-separated files. Microsoft deviated from the specification and decided some languages would use semicolons for CSVs.
Source: StackOverflow
cemicolon separated values
There is no specification for CSV, which is why it’s such a mess and different parsers and renderers have wildly different features. The closest thing to a spec is RFC4180 but that RFC simply describes the most common features across several CSV implementations, and is not actually a spec.
I agree that it should be comma separated though. My understanding is that it caused issues in countries that use a comma as a decimal point.
Also, Excel sometimes uses tabs rather than commas or semicolons.
Using comma would probably caused more problems as it is a decimal separator for those languages. My excel also uses semicolon in formulas instead of comma when separating parameters. Some VBA scripts break when using different language settings and some forumilas don’t translate automatically to different locale so they just give an error. Overall using excel in different locale setups is annoying.
Best separator I have used is | as i have never seen it in the data as an input. Comma and semicolon both have caused issues in the past for me as they might pop up at wrong places.