Glossary of technical terms

This is a collaborative glossary of technical terms to help students learn the language of technology.

Any CCI staff member or student can edit this page. Please follow the format others have given.

You can also make suggestions via Slack using the Workflow tab in #technical.

Caution to editors: As this document is likely to be edited by multiple people at once, your edit might be lost by someone saving over with their edits which didn't include yours, so please work in an external text editor using Mark Down and make sure you copy and paste into the document quickly to minimise clashes.

CSV / Comma Separated Values

Added by Tom Lynch

This is a method of encoding tabular data in a machine-readable format using an agreed ASCII character to separate data columns, usually a comma, but sometimes tabs, and new lines as rows.

Typically, the choice of ASCII character is based on whether the data is likely to have that character in a cell; for example, a cell can't have a comma if the data is encoded with commas or without using an escape character.

This data:

Name	Age
Tom	36
Kyle	34

Would be encoded like this:

Name,Age
Tom,36
Kyle,34