Richard et al.,
sometime after that article, there was a further thread on the use-list.
Pete Haworth found a case not properly covered by the version on the
article, and I came up with a revised version (cutely called csv4Tab !!
- csv3Tab was an interim, deeply buggy attempt)
(It's in
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-May/172275.html )
It *looks* from that thread (
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-May/172191.html ) as
though this case had been discussed, and the re-write should properly
handle it - but I haven't yet had time to try it. My laptop has been
replaced in the meantime, and I can't find my test stack, and recreating
it and finding the test data is a bit too much for after 1am:-)
So I'll try it tomorrow; hopefully csv4Tab() will already work for this
case. If it doesn't, we can try again :-)
-- Alex.
On 16/10/2015 00:34, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Mike Kerner wrote:
> Alex, Richard, etc.
>
> What do we consider the latest version of the csv parser? I think I
> found a bug in Richard's CSV2Text code, and proposed changes, but he
> wanted the discussion to go down over here, first. Then I noticed
> that csv4Text is out over here, which makes 2, I guess, a bit long in
> the tooth.
The version referred to here as "Richard's" is the famous Tweedly
algo, in the middle of this page:
<http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/csv-must-die.html>
Alex came up with that after a a bunch of us here had a long
discussion about the many variants of CSV running around, and how
stupidly complex they are to parse (see the details in that article).
Mike wrote me this afternoon letting me know that there's yet another
exception that doesn't seem to be accounted for there:
"value","","value"
I had thought we'd covered that in the earlier discussion, but perhaps
not.
So this seems like a good time to once again bring together the best
minds in our community (are you listening Alex Tweedly, Geoff Canyon,
Mark Weider, Dick Kreisel, and others?) to see if we can revisit CSV
parsing and come up with a function that can parse it into tabs
efficiently, while taking into account all of the really stupid
exceptions that have crept into the world since that really stupid
format was first popularized.
When we're done I'll update the article, and add even more sarcastic
comments about what a really dumb idea it was to have encouraged
people to delimit text with a character so frequently appearing in text.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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