this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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I’m a web developer that lets people export to CSV and quoting things is usually the answer. Though for a number with a comma in it I’d rather not quote it and leave it as a bare integer/decimal so that the data type is correctly inferred.
Speaking of, I have a handful of hacks I do specifically for Excel so that it infers types correctly — it needs more prodding than other applications importing CSV.
Yeah, CSV is an archaic data format that lacks a lot of important nuances; like understanding that not everything is done the same way everywhere around the world.
I guess one viable alternative would be to use tabs for delimiting the data, since (afaik) tabs are not commonly found in normal spreadsheet data (I admit that I could be wrong).
I’ve messed with both. But yeah, keeping an international mind is best. Separators are really unnecessary for data transfer so I usually just exclude them.
One quirk I remember for Excel to recognize a date it has to be
YYYY-MM-DD 12:00 PMbecause it doesn’t understand ISO-8601. 😓