
The basic idea of separating fields with a comma is clear, but that idea gets complicated when the field data may also contain commas or even embedded line-breaks. Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid in processing XML data. XML is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. The comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format.

Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. In computing, a comma-separated values (CSV) file stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text.


The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. In computing, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
