CSV (Line-by-Line) Records with JSON Encoding Rules - A Modern (Simple) Tabular Data Format incl. Arrays, Numbers, Booleans, Nulls, Nested Structures, Comments and More
# "Vanilla" CSV <3 JSON 1,"John","12 Totem Rd. Aspen",true 2,"Bob",null,false 3,"Sue","Bigsby, 345 Carnival, WA 23009",false or
# "Vanilla" CSV <3 JSON (Pretty Printed) 1, "John", "12 Totem Rd. Aspen", true 2, "Bob", null, false 3, "Sue", "Bigsby, 345 Carnival, WA 23009", false or
# CSV <3 JSON with header / headers row "id","name","address","regular" 1,"John","12 Totem Rd. Aspen",true 2,"Bob",null,false 3,"Sue","Bigsby, 345 Carnival, WA 23009",false or
# CSV <3 JSON with values containing quotes and commas "id","name","address","regular" 1,"John","12 Totem Rd., Aspen",true 2,"Bob",null,false 3,"Sue","\"Bigsby\", 345 Carnival, WA 23009",false or
# CSV <3 JSON with array values 1,"directions",["north","south","east","west"] 2,"colors",["red","green","blue"] 3,"drinks",["soda","water","tea","coffe"] 4,"spells",[] or
# CSV with all kinds of values "index","value1","value2" "number",1,2 "boolean",false,true "null",null,"non null" "array of numbers",[1],[1,2] "simple object",{"a": 1},{"a":1, "b":2} "array with mixed objects",[1,null,"ball"],[2,{"a": 10, "b": 20},"cube"] "string with quotes","a\"b","alert(\"Hi!\")" "string with bell&newlines","bell is \u0007","multi\nline\ntext" The recommended file format for CSV <3 JSON files is .csv :-) or use .json.csv (to highlight the fact of the JSON encoding rules).
Build your own parser:
- Read the input (e.g. string or file) line-by-line
- If the line is blank (only whitespace), skip the line.
- If the line starts with a hash mark (
#), skip the comment line. - Otherwise wrap the line in (
[]) and pass along to the JSON parser :-).
Example in Ruby:
def parse( input ) records = [] input.each_line do |line| ## note: chomp('') if is an empty string, ## it will remove all trailing newlines (e.g. \n or \r\n) from the line line = line.chomp( '' ) ## strip leading and trailing whitespaces (space and tab) line = line.strip next if line.empty? ## skip blank lines next if line.start_with?( '#' ) ## skip comment lines ## note: auto-wrap in array e.g. with [] records << JSON.parse( "[#{line}]" ) end records end- CSVJSON Format, see http://csvjson.org
- What's differnt?
- No comments, comments, comments.
- Uses a (simple ad-hoc) inline (optional) header schema format e.g.
{"field":"id","type":"int"},{"field":"name","type":"string"}, ...
- What's differnt?
- JSON Lines, see http://jsonlines.org
- Newline Delimited JSON (NDJSON), see http://ndjson.org
The CSV <3 JSON format is dedicated to the public domain.
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