CSV again.

[Bob Sneidar]

Someone wrote a piece years ago about why no one who wanted to maintain his sanity should attempt to write an XML to CSV parser. In the process of writing the piece, his mind degenerated until he was blathering on about non-sensical things. The devil had finished his work on the poor soul.

I do not think there *IS* a way to cover all the exceptions in a CSV parser. CSV does not lend itself to correct parsing. Just trying to figure out how to deal with a cr or lf inside quoted text will get you therapy. Never mind a thousands separator in a numeric non-quoted value, which will probably get you a stay in a very quiet hotel room where you can't find the checkout desk.

Bob S


On Oct 15, 2015, at 16:34 , Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com<mailto:ambassador at fourthworld.com>> wrote:

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.