Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Daily WTF: Financial Data Provider edition

A data provider that shall remain nameless (at least while I'm still employed at my current office) sends us daily CSV files. I was looking into a failure of the load of one of these files and noticed this... (values modified to protect the sanctity of the data)

[header row]
[first data row]
...
DAM, 0.2309674, 0.2309676,
POC, 0.000301957, 0.000301963,
* The [big data provider] Closing Spot Rates provided by [big data provider a] plc in conjunction with [big data provider b].The [big data provider] plc shall not be liable for any errors in or delays in providing or making available the data contained within this service or for any actions taken in reliance on the same except to the extent that the same is directly caused by its or its employees' negligence.

Thanks, [big data provider]! But next time, maybe you could shove that disclaimer someplace other than a file produced and consumed exclusively by machines, which happen to appreciate a specific format for their files, especially when said files are called, explicitly, Comma-Separated Values?

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