You'll have to admit that XML is a very good exchange standard: it allows you to specify the encoding of information, it get rid of line ending problems, it is reasonably sef-documented and quite human legible. If all else fails you can always fire up vi and figure out what's in the file you just received.
I know CSV is somewhat self documented if you include column headers but it is still easier to have the name of the field right around the field, even in the middle of 2 Mb of data than to have to go back to the beginning of the file, read the headers and figure out in which column you are. Plus some CSV files are pretty ugly. I just had to process the export of an Access DB that included multi-line fields that was a real pain to parse: there was no special end of record marker so Text::CSV_XS could not read records properly. An XML export would have solved this problem.
Plus of course the hype factor makes it way kewler for management to say they're sending XML than CSV. Maybe tilly should start a W3C working group on CSV ;--)
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|
