Enhanced Character Separated Values table format

[matthew-brett]

Just in case you hadn't seen it - this format seems minimal and well designed:

https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE6.rst

[rufuspollock]

@matthew-brett could you give a brief summary of the format here perchance? And good to hear from you 😄

[matthew-brett]

Quoting from the spec:

The proposed Enhanced CSV (ECSV) format has the following overall structure:

• A header section which consists of lines that start with the # character and provide the table definition and data format via a YAML-encoded data structure.
• An initial line in the header section which identifies the file as ECSV and provides a version number.
• A CSV-formatted data section in which the first line contains the column names and subsequent lines contains the data values.

See header details for details on the header. There are standard fields in the header (below), but:

Beyond the minimal standard, applications are free to create a custom data structure as needed using the top-level meta keyword.

The single required keyword is datatype, which contains a list of column specifiers (see below). Optional keywords are delimiter, meta and schema.

The column specifiers must give the column name and datatype and may also specify unit, format, description and meta, where meta is an arbitrary structure giving meta-data for the column.

Currently the standard reader is in Astropy, but the project is currently discussing breaking it out into its own library - see here.

And - hello from semi-sunny Birmingham ... :)