
Ask HN: What's your preferred output format? - k4ch0w
Do you prefer JSON, XML, Plaintext, CSV, XLS, YAML, etc? And why?
======
zzo38computer
What is it supposed to be the output of? I think that it would depend on that

SQLite includes an extension to deal with JSON, and the command shell can also
deal with CSV, and I also wrote a JSON parser in PostScript, so that means it
can easily be used with PostScript codes too now, and of course JavaScript
also has JSON built-in.

------
JoshTriplett
Depends heavily on the data.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and almost completely unstructured,
plaintext.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and structured but formatting doesn't
matter, HTML.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and formatting matters, PDF.

If it's intended for humans to read and write via hand-editing, and then
subsequently have a machine work with, then TOML. (Never YAML.)

If it's fundamentally tabular, CSV. (Never XLS.)

If it's an API result from a web API, reluctantly JSON; as much as I'd prefer
TOML, JSON is more universal.

------
billconan
this is the best in my opinion

[https://hjson.github.io/](https://hjson.github.io/)

xml is too wordy

yaml, well I don't like indentation based formats, hard to see clearly

