ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI've done this. Everybody hated it. Most text editors don't display anything useful with these characters (either hiding them altogether or showing a useless "uknown" placeholder), and spreadhseet tools don't support the record separator (although they all let you provide a custom entry separator so the "unit" separator can work). Besides the obvious problem that there's no easy way to type the darned things when somebody hand-edits the file.
> with no restrictions on the text in fields or the need to try and escape characters. Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it still need escaping for those ASCII separator characters (or alternatively, a restriction for the stored text not to have them)? It's true that having to deal with escaping much less often (since the ASCII separator characters are rarer than commas/quotes) would be convenient for manual reading/writing, but I feel that's canceled out by the characters being…
Most of the control characters for ASCII have been ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes Just as the ANSI terminal codes other than the ones supported by the VT100 are mainly unimplemented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 827
- Total comments
- 400
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-03-26 | ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited textFirst breakout · Best thread | fishy929 | 695 | 280 |
| 2016-08-21 | ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB Delimited Text | bsg75 | 3 | 0 |
| 2017-09-12 | ASCII-delimited text | enkiv2 | 4 | 0 |
| 2018-02-06 | Text File Formats – ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB Delimited Text (2009) | DyslexicAtheist | 3 | 0 |
| 2018-05-16 | Text File Formats – ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB Delimited Text (2009) | blux | 3 | 0 |
| 2020-09-25 | Text File Formats: ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text | ingve | 3 | 0 |
| 2022-06-30 | Text File Formats – ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text | gbrown_ | 2 | 3 |
| 2024-11-10 | ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited TextHall induction · Latest 20+ point return | ejstronge | 114 | 117 |