CSV again.

[Alex Tweedly]

Richard et al.,

sometime after that article, there was a further thread on the use-list. 
Pete Haworth found a case not properly covered by the version on the 
article, and I came up with a revised version (cutely called csv4Tab !! 
- csv3Tab was an interim, deeply buggy attempt)

(It's in 
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-May/172275.html )

It *looks* from that thread ( 
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-May/172191.html ) as 
though this case had been discussed, and the re-write should properly 
handle it - but I haven't yet had time to try it. My laptop has been 
replaced in the meantime, and I can't find my test stack, and recreating 
it and finding the test data is a bit too much for after 1am:-)

So I'll try it tomorrow; hopefully csv4Tab() will already work for this 
case. If it doesn't, we can try again :-)

-- Alex.

On 16/10/2015 00:34, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Mike Kerner wrote:
> > Alex, Richard, etc.
> >
> > What do we consider the latest version of the csv parser?  I think I
> > found a bug in Richard's CSV2Text code, and proposed changes, but he
> > wanted the discussion to go down over here, first.  Then I noticed
> > that csv4Text is out over here, which makes 2, I guess, a bit long in
> > the tooth.
>
> The version referred to here as "Richard's" is the famous Tweedly 
> algo, in the middle of this page:
> <http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/csv-must-die.html>
>
> Alex came up with that after a a bunch of us here had a long 
> discussion about the many variants of CSV running around, and how 
> stupidly complex they are to parse (see the details in that article).
>
> Mike wrote me this afternoon letting me know that there's yet another 
> exception that doesn't seem to be accounted for there:
>
>    "value","","value"
>
> I had thought we'd covered that in the earlier discussion, but perhaps 
> not.
>
> So this seems like a good time to once again bring together the best 
> minds in our community (are you listening Alex Tweedly, Geoff Canyon, 
> Mark Weider, Dick Kreisel, and others?) to see if we can revisit CSV 
> parsing and come up with a function that can parse it into tabs 
> efficiently, while taking into account all of the really stupid 
> exceptions that have crept into the world since that really stupid 
> format was first popularized.
>
> When we're done I'll update the article, and add even more sarcastic 
> comments about what a really dumb idea it was to have encouraged 
> people to delimit text with a character so frequently appearing in text.
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
>
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