Is there a way (or best practice) to markup the head (<th> equivalent) of a CSV document?

Question

I am exporting data from a database using PHP to convert it into a CSV. I figured it'd be useful to provide the first row with a title (similar to the <th> element in HTML) so the end user would understand the column's meanings. Example

=============
| id | name |
=============
| 0  | tim  |
| 1  | tom  |
=============

Which would look like this as a CSV

id, name
0, tim
1, tom

Is there a way to mark up the first row's columns or do anything differently that programs that often read CSVs (example Microsoft Excel) will mark it up accordingly. I.e. provide a semantic hook to inform the client (possibly Excel but not restricted to) that this is a column header?

Answer 1

Nope. And to make it even more fun, there's nothing that says that the header line has to be present at all. Good times, good times...

Answer 2

The best practice I can think of myself is to make the headings the first row only. But this is obviously common sense.

Answer 3

One key thing to avoid with CSVs is to avoid using 'ID' as the first characters in the file. The lowercase 'id' or double-quoted '"ID"' is acceptable, but if Excel comes across upper-case 'ID' it tries to open the file as a SYLK file and fails.

(edit: note that single quotes in the above should be ignored)