Many applications that accept CSV files have options to select the delimiter character and the quotation character. This loose terminology can cause problems in data exchange.

A delimiter guaranteed not to be part of the data greatly simplifies parsing.Īlternative delimiter-separated files are often given a '.csv' extension despite the use of a non-comma field separator.

These include tab-separated values and space-separated values. The term 'CSV' also denotes several closely-related delimiter-separated formats that use other field delimiters such as semicolons. Some implementations disallow such content while others surround the field with quotation marks, which yet again creates the need for escaping if quotation marks are present in the data.

Separating fields with commas is the foundation, but commas in the data or embedded line breaks have to be handled specially. The CSV file format is not fully standardized. A CSV file typically stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text, in which case each line will have the same number of fields. The use of the comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas.

A simple CSV file listing three people and the companies they work forĭatabase information organized as field separated listsĪ comma-separated values ( CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values.

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