Export to CSV - proper format

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Flavius Moldovan" <flaviusm at hotmail.com>
>> 
>> Using "tab" as a delimiter is an excellent idea. I have tested it and
>> it works great. This is exactly what I needed because our data entry
>> guys use all possible printable characters from the keyboard
>> (including '|').
>
>Well, congratulations, then, Flavius; you win our prize (my voice on your
>home answering machine -- no, wait; that's Saturdays).
>
>You mark the only time in 28 years that I have *ever* run across data entry 
>that required putting a vertical bar/pipe character in an entry field as part
>of regular data.  And yes, most of that has been business DP and most of it
>was filePro.
>
>What the heck are your folks entering?  :-)

Anything that can be typed in a data field will be entered.  It's
up to the application to validate data and reject bogus data, but
on many text fields, it's not easy to reject invalid characters,
even with good regular expression handling as in python and perl.

Since the TAB character is used in pretty much any data entry
screen to move from a field to some other field, it cannot be
entered as data thus is the safest to use for the field delimiter.

Robust systems never make any assumptions about data entry being
done correctly or even logically (not to mention maliciously).
Improper (no) checking leads to SQL injection attacks, many PHP
exploits, etc. which are left open by ``programmers'' who use
these very simple languages without understanding these issues.

Bill
-- 
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