What CSV is
CSV is a text file where each line is a row and commas separate the fields. There is no type system, no formatting and no second sheet. Every value is text until something downstream decides otherwise.
Almost every database, analytics tool and spreadsheet can read and write it, which is why exports default to it.
What TOML is
TOML is a configuration format with explicit types and a table syntax, designed to be unambiguous where YAML is clever.
Rust and Python projects, and anything with a pyproject.toml or Cargo.toml.
What changes when you convert CSV to TOML
Reading CSV means deciding three things the file does not state: which character separates fields, how quotes work, and what encoding the bytes are in. Tablizer sniffs the delimiter from the first few lines, handles quoted fields containing commas and newlines, and reads the file as UTF-8.
Each row becomes an entry in an array of tables. Keys are sanitised to bare keys where possible and quoted where not.
What carries over from CSV to TOML
CSV records 2 things about a table that TOML has no way to hold.
TOML wants a type for each column, and CSV does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
TOML has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
CSV can be read one record at a time. TOML has to be complete before it means anything, so the whole table is held in memory while it is written and a file that gets cut off part way through is not partly usable - it is unusable.
The identifier 007 comes out of the TOML as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a TOML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the TOML.