CSVstä

CSVstä is a term used to describe a CSV-inspired data interchange format designed to improve flexibility and multilingual data handling. It is not an official standard, but appears in discussions and some experimental tooling as an extension of the common CSV concept.

Core characteristics retain the familiar line-based records and delimiter-separated fields, while introducing optional enhancements. The default delimiter remains a single character (commonly comma), but any single character can be used to accommodate regional conventions. Fields that contain the delimiter or line breaks are enclosed in double quotes, and internal quotes can be escaped by doubling or by a backslash, depending on the implementation. UTF-8 encoding is recommended to support multilingual data safely.

A distinguishing feature of CSVstä is the optional schema and metadata support. A metadata header may precede the data, and a separate schema line or block can define field names and data types. Some variants allow comments starting with a designated symbol (for example, a leading hash) that do not affect payload data. This design aims to improve data validation, parsing reliability, and human readability without changing the basic attachment of records.

Interoperability with existing tools varies. Spreadsheet programs and many CSV libraries can parse CSVstä when configured for the correct delimiter and encoding, but lack universal standardization. As a result, adoption tends to be limited to experimental workflows or environments where explicit schemas and multilingual data support are valued.

See also CSV, TSV, and data interchange formats.