From: Iain 'Spoon' Truskett <spoon@...>
Date: 2003-02-21T23:55:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp help: Parsing a CSV file

* Brian Candler (B.Candler@pobox.com) [22 Feb 2003 01:41]:

[...]
> "this","is\nan example"

> but then that's not CSV. How about saving as XML instead? :-)

Well, definitions of CSV are somewhat flexible. Some programs happily
accept C escape sequences within the field values. Some don't. Some will
regard a raw new line while in quotes. Some won't. Some will allow
single quotes as well as double quotes. Some won't. Some do "" to
indicate a " inside "...". Some do \". Some do both.

All in all, for a "simple" file format, it's not really that standard =)

I'm sure I saw a parser somewhere that had most of those as options, for
both import and export.



cheers,
-- 
Iain.
who just spent the past half hour or so converting perl's Text::CSV to
ruby. A pointless exercise beyond getting some ruby practice in.