Devs Using CSV Delimiter as Fill Value and Seeing No Problem

Description

A screenshot of a tweet from the account 'Imposter' (@imposter_coding) on a dark background. The tweet reads: 'If you ever feel like you don't belong in IT, just remember there are devs with job experience who use the delimiter also as a fill value when creating a csv and don't see a problem with that.' The humor highlights a fundamental data engineering antipattern where developers use the same character (typically a comma) both as the CSV delimiter AND as a fill/default value in data fields, which completely breaks CSV parsing. This is the kind of basic mistake that would cause silent data corruption and drive anyone who has to consume the CSV absolutely insane

Common Tags

Csv DataFormats DataQualityIssues BadPractices CodingMistakes ImposterSyndrome DataEngineering DeveloperHumor DataValidation BugsInSoftware

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick This is the data engineering equivalent of using your house key as a toothpick -- technically it fits in the hole, but you're ruining everything

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

This is the data engineering equivalent of using your house key as a toothpick -- technically it fits in the hole, but you're ruining everything
@SpYvy 8mo

And how to do it correctly?
1. @JackOhSheetImSorry 8mo
  
  Wrap the cell content with quotes. If there are quoting inside cells, the are doubled E.g. Cell 1;"Big cell 2; Still ""this"" cell"; Cell 3
2. @deadgnom32 8mo
  
  you can set a custom delimiter, which isn't a part of any value, or do as jack suggested to do.
  
  @bulattte 8mo
  
  Can't u use something like: null, 0 or none?
  
  @deadgnom32 8mo
  
  well, yes. but then date will look like day0month0year 280110"2025" or (not sure a delimiter can consist of multiple characters, but assuming yes): daynullmonthnullyear 28null11null2025 I fail to see how does it make anything easier.
  
  @bulattte 8mo
  
  Wait, u talking about separator. From the meme I thought it's about fill value, that should fill some cells if there's no data
  
  @deadgnom32 8mo
  
  you can just omit data cell1,cell2,cell3 1,,3 no need to fill I thought they mean values itself
@Bjastkuliar 8mo

The issue with using commas in CSV appears when dealing with localised decimal values of countries which use comma as a decimal separator (instead of the dot)
@SamsonovAnton 8mo

Acceptable!
1. Deleted Account 8mo
  
  Acceptable!
@bulattte 8mo

Just wondering. I've never created csv files
@FunnyGuyU 8mo

Specifications? No. I will create my new CSV format! I'll spend a whole week then to implement my parser for it. Then I'll prove to you that my custom CSV format is bettter.
@deadgnom32 8mo

I had the same feeling, but then I recalled, that csv is a text format meant to be understood visually besides of technical parsing — and even so — there is no need to fill an empty value with some value — you can literally let it off to be empty. https://t.me/devs_chat/178318
@Agent1378 8mo

Isn't csv separated with ;?
1. @Valithor 8mo
  
  Commas
  
  @Agent1378 8mo
  
  Excel thinks different
  
  @chupasaurus 8mo
  
  Embrace, extend, extinguish
  
  @chupasaurus 8mo
  
  FYI C in CSV is Character in MS slang
2. @hy60koshk 8mo
  
  Not historically, but in practice the semicolon is much more convenient for text storage, while comma is mostly used for numbers-only data nowadays. But it doesn't really matter, because in terms of text/mixed types and table-like readability both are no match for TSV. Also, CSV is commonly used for database table export, and in that case, comma is most convenient, since you can directly copypaste data from CSV into a query.

Use J and K for navigation

Devs Using CSV Delimiter as Fill Value and Seeing No Problem

Description

Categories

Common Tags

Comments

More like this

TOON Format Beats JSON for LLM Data Retrieval Accuracy While Using Fewer Tokens

The Analog Approach to CSV Compression

Sabotaging Your Own Data Breach with CSVs