From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2001-11-05T05:25:21+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24349] Re: Joys of eval

Hi Albert,

From: "Albert Wagner" <alwagner@tcac.net>
>
> A few weeks ago I posted a request for help with regexp, split, scan, et. 
> al., in an attempt to separate a comma delimited string into its component 
> fields.  I just stumbled upon an obvious but previously unseen solution to 
> the problem:
> 
> x = '"abc","de,f",123,4.56,"ghi"'
> y = eval('['<<x<<']')
> 
> y is now:  ["abc", "de,f", 123, 4.56, "ghi"]
> 

Just wondering if the regexp version had indeed worked out OK, or have
you encountered data since then it couldn't handle?

(The one in [ruby-talk:22534] didn't handle embedded quotes for instance;
the one in [ruby-talk:22537] can handle embedded quotes, but, I suspect,
probably not the way something like MSAccess might output them, given
what was learned about Excel's seemingly strange way of quoting in
[ruby-talk:22541] . . . :-)

By the way I recently discovered that the flatten!.compact! used in 
the code referenced above should be changed to flatten.compact without
the exclamation points.  Or at least the 'flatten' at any rate - because
the 'flatten!' version "returns nil if no modifications were made."
(Pickaxe, Ch. 22)  Whereas, we need the resulting array always, modified
or not, to pass on to 'compact'.

If you have need of handling embedded quotes in the CSV parsing, perhaps
you could post some examples here of the quoting syntax MSAccess uses to
encode the data?  I'm pretty sure the regexp can be adapted to handle it.

For instance, Excel had taken:

+-----+---------------+
|blerb|"hey,you","man,|
+-----+---------------+

And had written (to the .csv file):

blerb,"""hey,you"",""man,"

. . . But, odd-looking or not, this appears well within the realm of
regexps to handle.  :-)


Regards,

Bill