On 2007-07-05, John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jul 6, 5:31 am, Neil Cerutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Mostly you can use the default 'excel' dialect and be quite >> happy, since Excel is the main reason anybody still cares about >> this unecessarily hard to parse (it requires more than one >> character of lookahead for no reason except bad design) data >> format. > > One cares about this format because people create data files of > millions of rows (far exceeding the capacity of Excel (pre-2007)) in > many imaginative xSV dialects, some of which are not handled by the > Python csv module. > > I don't know what you mean by "requires more than one > character of lookahead"
It's because of the silly way that quotes are quoted in quoted fields. "a,""b",c But I'm not a parsing expert by any means. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
