Data Format Standards: RFC 8259, YAML 1.2, CSV RFC 4180 Summarized
Understand the official standards behind JSON (RFC 8259), YAML 1.2, and CSV (RFC 4180). Know what each mandates vs. what parsers typically allow.
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Tags: data, standards, formats
Data Format Standards: RFC 8259, YAML 1.2, CSV RFC 4180 Summarized Standards documents are long and dense. Most developers never read them — they read blog posts summarizing what some developer thought was in them. This article goes to the source for the three most important text-based data format standards, extracts the parts that actually affect your code, and explains the real-world implications. YAML: The 1.1 vs 1.2 Divide YAML doesn't have an RFC number — it's defined at yaml.org. The key versions are 1.1 (2005) and 1.2 (2009). The version matters because many parsers still implement 1.1 semantics. The Norway Problem: What YAML 1.1 Got Wrong YAML 1.1 included an extensive "implicit typing" system where bare scalars were interpreted as typed values: The → coercion broke any YAML file…
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