From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2009-01-22T09:34:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Help with FasterCSV monkey patch

On Jan 21, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Alfredo Mesen wrote:

> Hello, I've been trying to monkey patch FCSV to allow escaped colsep
> characters within a field:
>
> FCSV.parse "here\\, it is, other fields"  #need:  [["here\\, it is",
> "other fields"]]

My advice is don't do this, unfortunately.  :(

I've tried to add this feature to FasterCSV multiple times now.  It's  
very hard and I haven't been able to find a good way to do it for  
general cases.  I fully admit this is a failing of FasterCSV, it's  
very dependent on the proper CSV format.

You probably have three reasonable choices:

* Feed FasterCSV a line at a time, rescue the MalformedCSVError, and  
switch strategies on those lines
* Preprocess all lines to be sure they are valid CSV and then hand  
them off
* Build your own parser

Sorry I wasn't more help.

James Edward Gray II