CSV stands for comma separated values. It is a spreadsheet format where each column is separated by a comma and each row by a newline. Here is an example CSV file:
You can download this file and view it in Excel, Google Docs, or even directly in a text editor. This same data saved in Excel format uses 4591 bytes and is supported by less applications.
A CSV file can be imported into a database or parsed with a programming language. This flexibility makes CSV the most common output format requested by clients for their scraped data.
Here is an example showing how to parse a CSV file with Python: