Re: Comment on "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web": Definition of null field

On Apr 6, 2014, at 2:54 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> Hi Jeni and Gregg,
> 
> First of all, very nice work on this!
> http://w3c.github.io/csvw/syntax/
> I haven't read it in detail, but I do have a few comments/suggestions, which I will break into separate messages.
> 
> Section 2.1 Core Data Model
> http://w3c.github.io/csvw/syntax/#h3_core-model
> says "Some of these fields may be null fields".  What exactly *is* a null field?  I think this needs to be defined.  Is it possible, in the absence of assistive metadata, for a CSV+ document to have a null field?  In a CSV document, how would a null field be distinguishable from a field consisting of an empty string?  Or are they the same?  They certainly are not the same in a database.

(FYI: The work is almost entirely Jeni's, I just contributed the EBNF).

Not an official response, but I think that any field delimited by separators (",") is empty, and can't be null. If a record had viewer fields than columns, then the missing fields would be null, but this would also be an illegal CSV.

[[[
4.4 Lines

Each line of a CSV+ file must contain the same number of comma-separated values.
]]]

Gregg


> Thanks!
> David
> 
> 

Received on Sunday, 6 April 2014 22:24:36 UTC