text files with quotes

[Geoff Canyon]

>David,
>
>Thanks for the response  :-)
>
>A sample line in a file I might want to parse:
>1,"5/14/02, 10:00 AM",Pending,Batch0001,"This is a memo field, gee it's
>cool",45362
>

Assuming what you want is:

Remove quotes
Leave commas that are in quotes alone
Replace commas outside of quotes with tab (for instance)

This will do it. Note that this doesn't account for tabs that might exist in the input.

  put field "in" into tInputList
  put empty into tOutputList
  put false into tInQuotes
  set the itemDelimiter to quote
  repeat for each item I in tInputList
    if tInQuotes then
      put I after tOutputList
      put false into tInQuotes
    else
      replace "," with tab in I
      put I after tOutputList
      put true into tInQuotes
    end if
  end repeat
  
  put tOutputList into field "out"

I tested on 16,000 lines like the one you showed above. On a G3 400 it took about .75 seconds.
-- 

regards,

Geoff Canyon
gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com