Hello monks,

I need to read in a CSV file, do some munging, and write out the alterations to a new CSV file. I'd like to use Text::CSV for this, but the problem is this particular CSV file uses double-quotes only around fields it has defined as "text fields" (although the contents of a particular text field may actually be a number). To make matters worse, the fields can change from one line to the next. (Actually, I have file layouts that would help me determine which lines are going to have which field definitions, but if possible, I'd like to find a "generic" solution that will work with other files from this same application.)

So, I may need to read in lines like: 

"hi",3,20.6,"green","32"
16,"alpha",0.00

[download]
and write them out as 
"bye",3,27.6,"green","32"
16,"beta",0.00

[download]
As far as I can tell, Text::CSV can handle all of this except writing out with quotes the way I need. It either writes everything with quotes or nothing. For my purposes, if the field had quotes coming in, it needs quotes going out.

I don't want to write my own CSV parser for this. Can I still use Text::CSV somehow, or is there another perlish solution?

-E

In reply to Writing CSV files by EyeOpener

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