I live in France and let me tell you: CSV is not good enough.
What about France you say? The decimal point is a coma, and to avoid confusion, the list separator is a semicolon. So "1.5, 1.6" becomes "1,5; 1,6" when localized. And if you think it is terrible for CSVs, well, it is worse than that.
If we all used RFC4180 consistently, it would work, but of course, that would be too simple. Some software insist on localization. So unless you need to know the software and locale that goes with that CSV. In the most simple case: you can treat both comas and semicolons as separators and it will work for reading, for writing, you have to pick one that the target software hopefully understands.
Hell starts when you have decimal numbers, because sometimes, you get exported CSVs where the coma is used both as a decimal point and as a separator. It makes the number ambiguous and your file becomes useless. It can result in data loss (personal experience). For example "1,2,3" may be [1.2, 3] or [1, 2.3]. And even without that, you still have to guess if you are using points and comas or comas and semicolons.
And of course, there the quoting/escaping issues every country has. Good thing the RFC has clear rules, I heard you can even find software where they are properly implemented. Of course, in France we also have the added bonus of questioning whether or not comas should be quoted since they are not the localized separator.
And character encoding? Of course it is a mess, as with every text file, but CVS makes no effort to help, is it UTF-8? Latin1? I have seen both, and I have seen files mangled because they were opened with the wrong encoding. Also, line endings should be CRLF, for those who care.
CSV as defined by the RFC is good enough, the problem is how it is used in practice.
What about France you say? The decimal point is a coma, and to avoid confusion, the list separator is a semicolon. So "1.5, 1.6" becomes "1,5; 1,6" when localized. And if you think it is terrible for CSVs, well, it is worse than that.
If we all used RFC4180 consistently, it would work, but of course, that would be too simple. Some software insist on localization. So unless you need to know the software and locale that goes with that CSV. In the most simple case: you can treat both comas and semicolons as separators and it will work for reading, for writing, you have to pick one that the target software hopefully understands.
Hell starts when you have decimal numbers, because sometimes, you get exported CSVs where the coma is used both as a decimal point and as a separator. It makes the number ambiguous and your file becomes useless. It can result in data loss (personal experience). For example "1,2,3" may be [1.2, 3] or [1, 2.3]. And even without that, you still have to guess if you are using points and comas or comas and semicolons.
And of course, there the quoting/escaping issues every country has. Good thing the RFC has clear rules, I heard you can even find software where they are properly implemented. Of course, in France we also have the added bonus of questioning whether or not comas should be quoted since they are not the localized separator.
And character encoding? Of course it is a mess, as with every text file, but CVS makes no effort to help, is it UTF-8? Latin1? I have seen both, and I have seen files mangled because they were opened with the wrong encoding. Also, line endings should be CRLF, for those who care.
CSV as defined by the RFC is good enough, the problem is how it is used in practice.