HACKER Q&A
📣 k4ch0w

What's your preferred output format?


Do you prefer JSON, XML, Plaintext, CSV, XLS, YAML, etc? And why?


  👤 zzo38computer Accepted Answer ✓
What is it supposed to be the output of? I think that it would depend on that

SQLite includes an extension to deal with JSON, and the command shell can also deal with CSV, and I also wrote a JSON parser in PostScript, so that means it can easily be used with PostScript codes too now, and of course JavaScript also has JSON built-in.


👤 JoshTriplett
Depends heavily on the data.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and almost completely unstructured, plaintext.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and structured but formatting doesn't matter, HTML.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and formatting matters, PDF.

If it's intended for humans to read and write via hand-editing, and then subsequently have a machine work with, then TOML. (Never YAML.)

If it's fundamentally tabular, CSV. (Never XLS.)

If it's an API result from a web API, reluctantly JSON; as much as I'd prefer TOML, JSON is more universal.


👤 billconan
this is the best in my opinion

https://hjson.github.io/

xml is too wordy

yaml, well I don't like indentation based formats, hard to see clearly