Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

Most of us programmers have encountered the CSV format at some point of our career. Whether you cooperate with financial people, analyze some scientific data or simply allow the users of your web app to download a record of their activities, chances are you'll use some variation of CSV as the data format. Note that I said some variation - CSV itself isn't standardized and there are lots of quirks in different implementations.

CSV libraries exist for lots of languages, making it a common format for interoperability (alongside XML or JSON) and sometimes preferred for data of a tabular nature. In the Rust ecosystem there is the csv crate which will be the focus of this blog post.