Bubble Foundry

CSV, or comma-separated values, is a non-standard which due to its apparent simplicity people think is a good data interchange format. It’s not. In this blog post I will attempt to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about CSV.

tl;dr: CSV is a a HORRIBLE ‘format’ and should NEVER be used. You will regret it. If you need a simple data exchange format that is easy to for lay people to read and write and widely supported by programming languages, use JSON (my first choice) or something like YAML.
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So simple but unforuntately I missed it until now:

scala -Dfile.encoding="UTF-8"

Now you can go to town with characters like ø and ∫! Oh, and you may want to alias this command in your ~/.profile:

alias scala='scala -Dfile.encoding="UTF-8"'

Recently I was trying to execute the following Javascript with jQuery: $("#someid").append("<div>...&deg;C</div>");

I was going crazy because it worked (a degrees symbol – ° – was shown) on one page but not another, where nothing was displayed or returned by the append method. After much frustration I stumbled on a solution and I’m sharing it here to hopefully save others some time.

I was stumped but luckily I ended up reading the Wikipedia page on character encoding in HTML and learned that XML has a much smaller set of character entity references. In fact, there are only five: & → &, < → <, > → >, " → “, ' → ‘. Makes sense, since you should be using UTF-8.

As it turns out, my working example was an HTML page while the non-working one was XHTML. Because of the XHTML content-type declaration the parser (I’m not sure whether in jQuery or my browser) was choking on the invalid character entity reference and failing completely. So, problem solved, though I wish the single offending entity was dropped, not the whole string!