Wow, I wonder if anybody has ever had to deal with CSV that has been made non-trivial by quotes and embedded commas? I bet they have... Perl's been around a long time, after all. Maybe I should search CPAN to see if one of the 15,000 distributions there can be useful to me: Text::CSV, Text::CSV_XS.

Sample code...

use Text::CSV;

my $csv = Text::CSV->new or die Text::CSV->error_diag;

while( my $row = $csv->getline(\*DATA) ) {
  print scalar @$row, " columns: (", join( ') (', @$row ), ")\n";
}

__DATA__
column1,column2,column3,column4,column5,column6,column7
data,data,"lname, fname mi","lname, fname mi","lname fname mi",data,da
+ta
data,data,"lname, fname mi","lname, fname mi",,data,data
data,data,"lname, fname mi",,,data,data
data,data,,,,data,data

[download]

Sample output:

$ ./mytest.pl
7 columns: (column1) (column2) (column3) (column4) (column5) (column6)
+ (column7)
7 columns: (data) (data) (lname, fname mi) (lname, fname mi) (lname fn
+ame mi) (data) (data)
7 columns: (data) (data) (lname, fname mi) (lname, fname mi) () (data)
+ (data)
7 columns: (data) (data) (lname, fname mi) () () (data) (data)
7 columns: (data) (data) () () () (data) (data)

[download]

(Adapted from the SYNOPSIS section in Text::CSV's POD.)


Dave

In reply to Re: Parsing CSV by davido
in thread Parsing CSV by kumoparris

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