Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV (2020)

31 points by lim 21 hours ago on lobsters | 6 comments

FRIGN | 11 hours ago

Friendly reminder to always put a comma into your passwords, so that when your password is stolen the corresponding CSV dump will most likely be corrupted.

migurski | 14 hours ago

“It’s a CSV, how hard could it be?”

the actual CSV doesn't quote fields and instead uses a different kind of comma

“Oh.”

alexk | 10 hours ago

I thought that was still somewhat manageable. I was more shocked when I read:

Specifically, if the neighborhood name is over 38 characters, or if the half-width katakana pronunciation field is over 76 characters, the line will be split into two lines. The overly-long neighborhood field will be continued and all other fields will be duplicated.

Why? Just... Why....?

ChrisDenton | 13 hours ago

People will go to any lengths to avoid using tabs ;)

jc00ke | 4 hours ago