A Concordance DAT file is simply a CSV text file that uses the following metacharacters:

• U+0014 Field Separator ("Comma") [DEVICE CONTROL FOUR]
• U+00FE String Delimiter ("Quote") [LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN]
• U+00AE Newline Placeholder ("Newline") [REGISTERED SIGN]

What's the best way to parse a Concordance DAT file using Modern Perl?

Assume the following:

• The file is in the UTF-8 character encoding form of Unicode
• The file has the Unicode byte order mark in it (U+FEFF), which must be handled properly
• Records are terminated by <CR><LF> pairs
• Despite the newline placeholder convention, fields can have literal <CR>, <LF>, and paired <CR><LF> characters in them
• The text in fields can be arbitrarily large (many megabytes)

Thanks!

Jim

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