Product Comparisons

Comparing CSV Lint to the recently launched (05 March 2015) OKFN Goodtables validator

Cliff Note Comparison

the biggest distinguishing factor is that CSVlint validates and keeps track of validations to ensure that the URL and associated CSV data remains valid, and the badges certification is also a unique selling point.

Good Tables aims at being part of 'a larger ETL pipeline', something CSVlint may now have in common with it depending on outcome of something something grafter

###GoodTables

"That’s where Good Tables comes in: it checks your data for you, giving you quick and simple feedback on where your tabular data may not yet be quite perfect."

http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-goodtables.html

Applications range from simple validation checks on CSV files, to integration with a larger ETL pipeline.

It's stated goals are

High-level design goals for Good Tables:

• Process tabular data in CSV, Excel and JSON formats
• Provide a suite of small tools that each implement a type of processing to run
• Provide a pipeline API for registering built-in and custom processors
• Components should be easily usable in 3rd party (Python) code

GoodTables http://goodtables.okfnlabs.org/ is quite similar to CSVLint - a web frontend built atop a validator program, albeit the program is written in python. GoodTables is also very much in Alpha mode - the UX is pretty clunky

Documentation is pretty solid - http://goodtables.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

http://goodtables.okfnlabs.org/help = undocumented but illustrates the forms of errors which the software catches

Missing Header
Duplicate Row
Duplicate Header
Defective Row
Empty Row
Unique Field
Incorrect Dimensions
Required Field
Incorrect Headers
Incorrect Type
Non-Required Field (Empty/Null)

in all of the above no guidance is provided as to what such errors mean or how to remedy them, so CSV lint has the edge in that respect

this package (http://jtskit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) is underdocumented but seems intended to work with Goodtables to enable editing of JSON schemas, which seems like something which would be useful for CSVlint