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roland35 | 5 months ago

To people saying that "your boss can open it" being an benefit of csv, well I have a funny story!

Back in the early 2000s I designed and built a custom data collector for a air force project. It saved data at 100 Hz on an SD card. The project manager loved it! He could pop the SD card out or use the handy USB mass storage mode to grab the csv files.

The only problem... Why did the data cut off after about 10 minutes?? I couldn't see the actual data collected since it was secret, but I had no issue on my end, assuming there was space on the card and battery life was good.

Turns out, I learned he was using excel 2003 to open the csv file. There is a 65,536 row limit (does that number look familiar?). That took a while to figure out!!

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IanCal|5 months ago

Love it.

The first data release I did excel couldn't open the CSV file, because it started with a capital I (first column ID). Excel looks at this, looks at this file with a comma in the header and text and the ending "csv" and says

I KNOW WHAT THIS IS

THIS IS A SYLK FILE

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH "I"

NO OTHER POSSIBLE FILE COULD START WITH THE LETTER "I"

then reads some more and says

THIS SYLK FILE LOOKS WRONG

IT MUST BE BROKEN

ERROR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Link_(SYLK)

IAmBroom|5 months ago

Yes! That was the STUPIDEST file encoding detection ever developed! OMG....