Product guide · 5 min read
Glossary: delimiter, RFC 4180, record, field, and escape characters
Short definitions for CSV vocabulary, helpful for SEO and onboarding engineers and analysts.
Published March 21, 2025 · Table
Shared vocabulary reduces bugs between producers and consumers of flat files.
Terms
- Delimiter: character separating fields (often comma or semicolon).
- Record: one row representing an entity instance.
- Field: single cell value within a record.
- Escape: doubling quotes inside quoted fields per RFC 4180.
- RFC 4180: common textual CSV profile for interoperability.
Explore linked guides on encoding, dates, and imports for deeper patterns.