Re: [Docutils-users] OT: DSV vs CSV

[Paul T. <pau...@gm...>]

On 10/17/11 10:00 PM, Alan G Isaac wrote:
> On 10/17/2011 7:07 PM, Paul Tremblay wrote:
>> the delimiter does not matter.
>>
>> If you think otherwise, can you please provide a concrete example
>
> Parse this:
> 32.654,32
>
> You won't know how unless I tell you what the delimiter is.
>
> But of course the whole idea of a "concrete example" misses
> the point.  A format is useful if I do not need to examine
> the data to read it in without ambiguity.  Playing around
> with the delimiters makes a mess of what could be clean.
>
> *That* is the role of standards.
> To remove such silly ambiguities.
>
> And *that* is why DSV can never become a *standard*,
> but CSV can.  And it is why people who care about
> scientific data draw the distinction. (Although we
> can imagine a DSV-like standard that uses the first
> line to specify a delimiter.)
>
>
Alan, it might be better if you actually learned how CSV worked before 
posting such silliness. You are wasting my time and probably everyone 
else  as well. It is one thing to argue semantics over DSV vs CSV, but 
quite another to wade into an area about which you (apparently) know 
nothing. You ask me how to parse a string in which I don't know the 
delimiter, but you might as well ask me to parse a file when I don't 
know the path or the encoding. The delimiter must be given

There are no standards for CSV. And if a standard gets passed that 
enforces commas for the delimiter, then that still doesn't change 
anything. The code would still exist to parse files that use different 
delimiters, and such files are quite useful. As I've stated before, I 
actually use space delimited files quite a bit.

If you think this suggestion is so outlandish, maybe you should check here:

delim : char | "tab" | "space"

     A one-character string used to separate fields. Defaults to , 
(comma). May
     be specified as a Unicode code point; see the unicode directive for 
syntax
     details.

Where am I getting his instruction that CSV can use spaces and tabs? 
Why, from the very documentation of resturedtext itself!

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#id1

Given that python has a whole library that uses different delimiters 
than a comma; and given that OO and MS do the same; and given that 
restructuredtext also follows the same practice (calling is CSV and not 
DSV), perhaps you just might consider that you are wrong?

Now maybe I can get back to actually working on problems in  
restructuredtext, like putting in MathML for the XML writer.

Paul