CSV

Data scienceOpen dataTechnology

CSV or Comma-separated values, is a standard format for spreadsheet data. Data values are separated by commas and each row represents a record.

Data is represented in a plain text file, with each data row on a new line and commas separating the values on each row. As a very simple open format it is easy to consume and is widely used for publishing open data.

As the name implies "comma" (,) is used as the so called delimiter, but other versions are also common such as tab-separation or semicolon separation.

In practice

An example of a CSV formatted file, with the first line being the header row.

country, year, value sweden, 2021, 59 japan, 2021, 61

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API – Application Programming Interface

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Human Readable

Data in a format that can be conveniently read by a human. Some human-readable formats, like PDF, are not machine-readable.

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Machine Readable

Data in a data format that can be automatically read and processed by a computer, such as CSV, JSON, or XML.