in reply to Re^2: Best Way To Parse Concordance DAT File Using Modern Perl?
in thread Best Way To Parse Concordance DAT File Using Modern Perl?

Thanks for the info. If the problem demonstrated by your snippet there is the one that is causing Text::CSV to fail on the real data of interest, then it would seem that you have to impose "proper handling" of the BOM yourself. Delete it from the input before passing the data to Text::CSV.

Since U+FEFF is (a) unlikely to be present anywhere else besides the beginning of the input file and (b) interpreted as a "zero width non-breaking space" if it were to be found anywhere else in the file (i.e., it lacks any linguistic semantics whatsoever), it should suffice to just delete it - here's a version of your snippet that doesn't produce an error: 


use Encode qw( decode_utf8 );
use Text::CSV_XS;

my $csv_bytes  = qq/\x{feff}"Field One","Field 2",3,4,"Field 5"\r\n/;
my $csv_record = decode_utf8($csv_bytes);

$csv_record =~ tr/\x{feff}//d;  ## Add this, and there's no error.

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new( { auto_diag => 1 } );

$csv->parse($csv_record);

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I suppose it's kind of sad that you need to do that for Text::CSV to work, but at least it works.

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Re^4: Best Way To Parse Concordance DAT File Using Modern Perl?
by Jim (Curate) on Dec 10, 2012 at 22:52 UTC

    Thanks, graff!

    The problem with having to handle the BOM oneself is that, though it works with Text::CSV_XS-parse(), it doesn't work with Text::CSV_XS->getline().

    Suppose we have this multi-line CSV record. There's a literal newline in field five.

    my $csv_record = qq{\N{BYTE ORDER MARK}"Field One","Field 2",3,4,"Fiel
+d
Five"
};

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    How would one parse this record using Text::CSV_XS?

    (See the companion thread titled Peculiar Reference To U+00FE In Text::CSV_XS Documentation for more information about this topic.)

    Jim

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      Ah. What a pisser. I wonder if you could make Text::CSV_XS work by reading from STDIN... If so, you would just filter out all the BOM characters before feeding the data to your script: 
      perl -CS -pe 'tr/\x{feff}//d' < source_file.dat | your_csv_parser ...

      [download]
      Either that, or else redirect the output of that one-liner to create a cleansed version of the DAT file that has all the BOMs stripped out, and use that "bastardized" version of the data as input to the parser. (I assume that getting the data parsed is more important that preserving its obtuse fixation with BOM characters.)
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