Alternative to CSV?

Question

I intend to build a RESTful service which will return a custom text format. Given my very large volumes of data, XML/JSON is too verbose. I'm looking for a row based text format.

CSV is an obvious candidate. I'm however wondering if there isn't something better out there. The only I've found through a bit of research is CTX and Fielded Text.

I'm looking for a format which offers the following:

• Plain text, easy to read
• very easy to parse by most software platforms
• column definition can change without requiring changes in software clients

Fielded text is looking pretty good and I could definitely build a specification myself, but I'm curious to know what others have done given that this must be a very old problem. It's surprising that there isn't a better standard out there.

What suggestions do you have?

Answer 1

I would say that since CSV is the standard, and since everyone under the sun can parse it, use it.

If I were in your situation, I would take the bandwidth hit and use GZIP+XML, just because it's so darn easy to use.

And, on that note, you could always require that your users support GZIP and just send it as XML/JSON, since that should do a pretty good job of removing the redundancy accross the wire.

Answer 2

I'm sure you've already considered this, but I'm a fan of tab-delimited files (\t between fields, newline at the end of each row)

Answer 3

You could try YAML, its overhead is relatively small compared to formats such as XML or JSON.

Examples here: http://www.yaml.org/

Surprisingly, the website's text itself is YAML.