#30 glossary file format and extension

[Sadi Yumusak]

It would be very helpful if several formats and extensions (e.g. txt, csv) could be supported for files that can be placed in the glossary folder.

[Raymond Martin]

Okay, this is for sure. Currently CSV and TSV are there, but will be looking into having TBX (or TBXBasic at least). Not sure about txt (plain text, in what form?).

Will need to survey what formats are standard for this, besides wholly proprietary/closed ones used by commercial CAT tools. Please provide any further information about specific formats of interest.

[Sadi Yumusak]

As CSV and TSV are actually nothing but TXT files including blocks of text separated by commas or tabs, I think TXT extension can also be supported, checking if it contains CSV or TSV format, so as to cover a wider range.

[Raymond Martin]

Technically, you are correct, but in practice this does not lead to any benefit over just adding the appropriate file extension on a file that you know is in the right format (it may lead to people including files that are not formatted correctly merely because TXT files are supposed to be accepted). CSV, itself (and TSV as a subtype of it) are considered a defacto standard for spreadsheet-like data, with most spreadsheet applications reading and writing these formats with a .csv extension.
TXT won't be added because it is not a separate format for glossary type data, it is a format for unstructured text. If that were to be added then we should add any arbitrary file extension to be read in, which only results in more programming with little benefit. Renaming appropriately formatted files is the fastest way to make use of what already exists.