From: "Ara.T.Howard" <Ara.T.Howard@...>
Date: 2005-11-01T05:01:53+09:00
Subject: Re: csv.rb a start on refactoring.

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, James Edward Gray II wrote:

> Ah, I forgot to glance at the grammar.  The above pretty much proves (to me), 
> that we're looking at malformed CSV.

yup.

> That's good news, because it means whatever we decide is right.  ;)  We're 
> off the map here anyway.
>
> To me, it's a decision about what you consider \r to be.  The current CSV 
> seems to call it a line ending.  I'm more inclined to consider it whitespace. 
> If I found a \v (vertical tab), I would leave it in the field because spaces 
> are a part of the field.  I feel the same about \r.
>
> I also would rather avoid throwing an Exception here.  "Be liberal in what 
> you accept," as the saying goes.  Stripping it seems against the spirit of 
> the format, so I guess that leaves calling it a line ending or whitespace.

i agree in principle - but design wise i'd say be consistent, if you are going
to handle stray \r then we need rules for stray \n, command, and " too - this
will make the code more complex and, i fear, slow.  perhaps it's safest and
easiest to simply bail if the csv is not perfect.

2cts.


-a
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