[gdal-dev] [OSGeo-Standards] CSV spatial data on the web

[Jeremy Palmer]

Hi Sfefan,

> On 17/02/2016, at 11:31 PM, Stefan Keller <sfkeller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Jeremy
>
> Semicolon is well supported in software.
> Tab is poorly supported in some text editors.
> Comma is heavy used in number values in european countries.
> What delimiter do you prefer and why?
>

Comma because it’s a well known default for most software. I agree semicolon is support almost as well. I see your european issue.

>> We also advertise the geometry datatype (useful for software quickly
>> reading the data field metadata), field lengths/widths in the VRT,
>
> That's covered by CSVT, isn't it?

Specification wasn’t clear and mentioned it could be supported. Looking at the actual OGR implementation is seems field width/lengths are supported (!), but still not the definition of the geometry field and type.

>
>> and have datasets with legitimate carriage returns within fields.
>
> Allowing non-printable control-characters in strings makes it very
> complicated and disables mainly all existing CSV software.

Yes but Excel handles it. So does OGR and QGIS Delimited Text Provider. From memory the Microsoft ODBC CSV driver doesn’t - but that’s got lots of issues.

> carriage returns is one of the few undisputed end-of-line things in
> CSV (besides CR, LF, CR/LF differences).
> Markup to the rescue.
> What do you prefer?
>

Markup can work but then it becomes about the reader being about to turn that markup into real carriage returns again. Mostly a pre-processing script is required first.

Cheers
Jeremy


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