What is an ECSV file? An ECSV file is an enhanced character-separated values file. It contains the typical plain text dataset you would expect to find in a .CSV file, prepended by YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) formatting. The YAML formatting allows ECSV files to contain metadata that typical CSV files cannot.

More Information ECSV file open in Microsoft Visual Studio Code Astronomer Tom Aldcroft developed the ECSV format to overcome limitations in the CSV format. For example, CSV datasets cannot contain metadata besides column names. ECSV files, on the other hand, can include metadata such as: Numerical data type Units Text descriptions of column content ECSV files store this metadata in YAML-formatted data structures, located at the beginning of the file. Each line in the YAML data structure's datatype section contains metadata for a corresponding CSV data column.