2Dteksttabellen

2Dteksttabellen is a data representation that organizes textual data into a grid of rows and columns. Each cell contains a string, and the two-dimensional layout enables straightforward viewing, editing, and processing of tabular information. The table is typically addressed by its row and column indices, with indexing conventions varying by language or tool.

In plain-text form, a 2Dteksttabellen is often stored or transmitted as lines of text, where each line represents a row and fields are separated by a delimiter such as a comma, a tab, or another character. The choice of delimiter and the support for escaping influence compatibility and parsing rules.

Common implementations include CSV (comma-separated values) and TSV (tab-separated values). These formats are simple, human-readable, and widely supported. They rely on quoting and escaping to handle occurrences of delimiters inside fields, and they commonly use UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding to support international text.

Typical operations involve parsing the text into a two-dimensional array or matrix, rendering aligned columns for display, and performing basic data manipulations such as filtering, sorting, or extracting a subset of rows or columns. The structure is also suitable for exporting data to spreadsheets or importing from databases.

Advantages of 2Dteksttabellen include portability, human readability, and compatibility with many tools. Limitations include lack of intrinsic data typing, potential ambiguity in escaping, and inefficiency for very large datasets. Complex data may require nesting or switching to more expressive formats or database systems.

Related concepts include CSV and TSV formats, spreadsheets, and relational databases.