Snowflake SnowPro Certification Practice Test

What is the default encoding for delimited files such as CSV and TSV?

1. ISO-8859-1

2. UTF-16

3. ASCII

4. UTF-8

The correct answer is: UTF-8

The default encoding for delimited files such as CSV (Comma-Separated Values) and TSV (Tab-Separated Values) is UTF-8. This encoding is a widely used standard that can represent any character in the Unicode standard, making it highly versatile for various languages and symbols. Using UTF-8 ensures compatibility and accessibility, as it supports a significant range of characters, including special characters and emojis, which are increasingly common in data. Aspects like ease of handling diverse datasets and ensuring proper reading and writing of characters across different systems underscore UTF-8's necessity in modern data processing. On the other hand, while ISO-8859-1 is limited to Western European languages, UTF-16 is a broader encoding but not commonly used as a default for CSV and TSV files. ASCII, although it is a foundational encoding scheme, lacks the ability to represent characters beyond the first 128 in the Unicode standard, making it insufficient for many modern data use cases.