Is there currently a way to host CSV or tab delimited data for helping with database, spreadsheets, or any grid-like applications?

Question

I noticed a pattern with Excel and Google Sheets questions that sample data is often presented in non-optimal ways. The data may not exist, only a screenshot of the image requiring someone to build their sample data, or perhaps an ANSI/ASCII type table with data is given. I saw that StackOverflow has a code snippet feature in the toolbar. I wonder if something similar is planned for SuperUser to host CSV or tab delimited data for database, spreadsheets, or any grid-like applications such as Excel?

Answer 1

I’ve been advising people to post their spreadsheet data as columnar text in “Code Sample” format, as was done here, here, and other places.  This is not very hard to generate.  For example, if you have these data:

       

and you copy and paste as text, you get TSV data:

CompanyTabPersonTabNumber
ACMETabL. FoggTab17
Sirius Cybernetics CorporationTabZaphod BeeblebroxTab42

If you have Unix/Linux (or even Cygwin), you can get from that to the desired columnar form with the command column -t -s$'\t' -o' '; as in:

$ cat data
Company Person  Number
ACME    L. Fogg 17
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation  Zaphod Beeblebrox       42

$ column -t -s$'\t' -o'    ' data
Company                           Person               Number
ACME                              L. Fogg              17
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation    Zaphod Beeblebrox    42

… or you can do it with a web service, like this (although I have trouble getting those to work well).  Or you can do it by pasting the TSV data into your browser and changing the tabs to spaces manually.  Then, of course there are several ways to get the data into “Code Sample” format:

• Select the data and

  • click on the {} button, or
  • type Ctrl+K

  or

• manually insert four spaces at the beginning of every line (this is what the previous option does automatically), or
• insert <pre> (and optionally <code>) before the data, and </pre> (and optionally </code>) after.

And of course you can reverse the process by copying the above into Excel and using “Text to Columns”.

---

You say, “I’d like to see markdown syntax for tables implemented by SE sites.”  This sounds like something that has been requested before (more than once):

• What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Exchange sites?
• Why can’t table markup elements be used?
• Is there any markdown to create tables?

and the response (apparently from authoritative sources) has been a firm “No”:

We do not (and will not) allow <table> tags.  Sorry.  This is intentional and by design.  If you need a quick and dirty “table”, use <pre> and ASCII layout.

Somewhat ironically, they seem to have enabled it on Stack Overflow: if you enter

<!-- begin snippet: js hide: false console: true babel: false -->

<!-- language: lang-html -->

<table><tr><th>Company<th>Person<th>Number
<tr><td>ACME<td>L. Fogg<td>17
<tr><td>Sirius Cybernetics Corporation<td>Zaphod Beeblebrox<td>42

<!-- end snippet -->

it renders initially as

and, if you click on ▶ Run code snippet, you get

which can be copied and pasted into Excel.  But I’m not sure what good that would do us even if we had it on Super User; unless I’m missing a trick, it’s too much work to enter the data that way.