Your vision on CSV is indeed very limited :)

Consider not only Excel (or other spreadsheet application) exports, but also:

• Database exports (including images, BLOB's, XML, Unicode, …)
• Log exports (I know of a situation that has to read 4Tb (tera-byte!) a day
• CSV exports where not only the data, but also the header-row has embedded newlines in the fields (and comma's)
• CSV files with mixed encoding (you should know that Oracle supports field-scoped encodings in their most recent versions)
• Nested CSV: each/any field in the CSV is (correctly or incorrectly quoted) CSV, but the final result is valid CSV
• I've seen CSV files with more than 65535 columns.

All of the above should remember you never to use regular expressions or read-by-line algorithms to parse CSV. It looks too easy to be true.

Now reconsider you last line: a CSV file does not have a humongous line length. It is likely to have a humongous record length. (Think of a database export where a table has stored movies in parts and each record has up to 4 pieces of the movies, so each CSV record can be Gb's. People use databases and CSV for weird things.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.