You probably already know what a CSV is, but a little refresher won't hurt.
The idea of the format is to take a table of values and write all rows down as records. Inside a record, every column item is written down and separated by a comma. That's where the format's name comes from—comma-separated values.
Let's do an example. In the following code, we are going to write a CSV comparing various planets in the solar system to our own. A radius, distance from the sun, and gravity of 1 means exactly as on earth. Written as a table, our values look like this:
name | radius | distance_from_sun | gravity |
Mercury | 0.38 | 0.47 | 0.38 |
Venus | 0.95 | 0.73 | 0.9 |
Earth | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Mars | 0.53 | 1.67 | 0.38 |
Jupiter | 11.21 | 5.46 | 2.53 |
Saturn | 9.45 | 10.12 | 1.07 |
Uranus | 4.01 | 20.11 | 0.89 |
Neptune | 3.88 | 30.33 | 1.14 |
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Take every row, separate the values by commas, put them each on a separate line, and you end up with the CSV file:
name,radius,distance_from_sun,gravity
Mercury...