CSV

CSV

CSV stands for comma-separated values. It is a very common data interchange format. Wikipedia has a page covering many concepts and variations of this format.

The general format is a series of text lines (i.e., text strings with line feeds/carriage returns at the end of each line), where each line contains a series of values that are separated by commas. Since it's a text format, a text editor can be used to view the contents. Depending on the format variation, the first line might serve as a header in which each value is the name of the column.

There are invariably caveats to dealing with CSV data. For example, if a value is a text string that contains a comma, then the comma either needs to be escaped or the string needs to be enclosed in quotes (and then, if the string contains quotes, those need to be escaped as well).