Editing Delimiter-separated values (section)

== Uses and applications ==

Due to their widespread use, comma- and tab-delimited text files can be opened by several kinds of applications, including most [[spreadsheet]] programs and [[statistical package]]s, sometimes even without the user designating which delimiter has been used.<ref>{{cite book | last = Knight | first = Andrew | title = Basics of Matlab and beyond | publisher = Chapman & Hall/CRC | location = Boca Raton | year = 2000 | isbn = 0-8493-2039-9 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | last = Robbins | first = Arnold | title = Classic Shell Scripting | publisher = O'Reilly | location = Sebastopol | year = 2005 | isbn = 0-596-00595-4 }}</ref> Despite that each of those applications has its own [[database design]] and its own [[file format]] (for example, accdb or xlsx), they can all map the fields in a DSV file to their own [[data model]] and format.{{citation needed|date=November 2016}}

Typically a delimited file format is indicated by a specification. Some specifications provide conventions for avoiding [[delimiter collision]]; others do not. Delimiter collision is a problem that occurs when a character that is intended as part of the data gets interpreted as a delimiter instead. Comma- and space-separated formats often suffer from this problem, since in many contexts those characters are legitimate parts of a data field. Most such files avoid delimiter collision either by surrounding all data fields in double quotes, or only quoting those data fields that contain the delimiter character. One problem with tab-delimited text files is that tabs are difficult to distinguish from spaces; therefore, there are sometimes problems with the files being corrupted when people try to edit them by hand. Another set of problems occur due to errors in the file structure, usually during import of file into a [[database]] (in the example above, such error may be a pupil's first name missing).

Depending on the data itself, it may be beneficial to use non-standard characters such as the tilde (~) as delimiters.  With rising prevalence of web sites and other applications that store snippets of code in databases, simply using a " which occurs in every hyperlink and image source tag is not sufficient to avoid this type of collision.  Since colons (:), semi-colons (;), pipes (|), and many other characters are also used, it can be quite challenging to find a character that is not being used elsewhere.