Comma-delimited values

[Paul D. DeRocco]

> From: wayne durden
>
> I hear your pain on the CSV issue.  However, wishing it would die I think
> deserves a more careful reflection.  Sometimes the devil you know is worse
> than the alternative...

It's only difficult to deal with CSV if you want to make a totally general
importer, with no foreknowledge of the type of data the files will contain.
But in most real-life situations, you'll never need to deal with a double
quote or newline in the data, so using newlines to separate records, and
double quotes to escape commas within records, is a perfectly workable
definition of the CSV format. It would never occur to anyone to use CSV to
represent records containing binary data, so it isn't much more of a
restriction to rule out control characters and double quotes. Your
application is a typical example; so is using CSV as an interchange format
for GPS logs.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco at ix.netcom.com