CSV without doubts!

PSV is a text based data format for tabular data. It is similar to CSV in function, but more strictly defined. Although there is RFC 4180 for CSV, in practice there are a lot of incompatibilites between CSV implementations. I.e. trying to open a CSV file in a spreadsheet program leads to a plethora of (mostly technical) options. The goal of PSV is to simplify reading and writing tabular data by defining as much technical aspects as possible.

1. PSV files are text files encoded with UTF-8
2. Every line represents a row delimited by LF or CRLF characters
3. The last line has no line ending
4. Every row consists of one or more fields separated by a pipe character
5. There are no leading or trainling pipe characters
6. Some characters are escaped by a leading backslash
   • carriage return: \r
   • line feed: \n
   • backslash: \\
   • pipe character: \|
7. All other characters preceeded by a backslash are treated as is

CSV:

aaa,bbb,ccc

PSV:

aaa|bbb|ccc

CSV:

"aaa","bbb","ccc"<CRLF>
zzz,yyy,xxx

PSV:

aaa|bbb|ccc<CRLF>
zzz|yyy|xxx

CSV:

"aaa","b<CRLF>
bb","ccc"<CRLF>
zzz,yyy,xxx

PSV:

aaa|b\nbb|ccc<CRLF>
zzz|yyy|xxx

CSV:

"aaa","b""bb","ccc"<CRLF>
zzz,"yy,y",xxx

PSV:

aaa|b"bb|ccc<CRLF>
zzz|yy\|y|xxx

There are no doubts about the encoding. It's always UTF-8. No BOM!

Since carriage return and line feed characters are escaped, a parser can assume, that an unescaped LF or CRLF character always represents the end of a row.

A carriage return can therefor simply be ignored, when parsing a PSV stream.

If the last line in a PSV stream contains a CRLF or LF line ending, the parser will create another row with one empty field.

Every row has at least one field. Multiple fields are separated by the pipe character "|".

A leading or trailing pipe character in a line represents an additional empty field.

The following characters in a fields content are treated special by escaping them with a leading backslash:

• carriage return: \r
• line feed: \n
• backslash: \\
• pipe character: \|

This is one of the core aspects of PSV!

A backslash can theoretically occur everywhere in a stream. If the following character is none of the ones listed in Rule 6, it will be ignored.

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