I intend to build a RESTful service which will return a custom text format. Given my very large volumes of data, XML/JSON is too verbose. I'm looking for a row based text format.
CSV is an obvious candidate. I'm however wondering if there isn't something better out there. The only I've found through a bit of research is CTX and Fielded Text.
I'm looking for a format which offers the following:
- Plain text, easy to read
- very easy to parse by most software platforms
- column definition can change without requiring changes in software clients
Fielded text is looking pretty good and I could definitely build a specification myself, but I'm curious to know what others have done given that this must be a very old problem. It's surprising that there isn't a better standard out there.
What suggestions do you have?
I would say that since CSV is the standard, and since everyone under the sun can parse it, use it.
If I were in your situation, I would take the bandwidth hit and use GZIP+XML, just because it's so darn easy to use.
And, on that note, you could always require that your users support GZIP and just send it as XML/JSON, since that should do a pretty good job of removing the redundancy accross the wire.
I'm sure you've already considered this, but I'm a fan of tab-delimited files (\t between fields, newline at the end of each row)
You could try YAML, its overhead is relatively small compared to formats such as XML or JSON.
Examples here: http://www.yaml.org/
Surprisingly, the website's text itself is YAML.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3874692/alternative-to-csv