All well and fine. I have a situation again where ROOTman (as we will call him) does not like anyone adding Perl modules to the production server. Though he's a Perlist himself, requests for additional modules are rebuffed as he cannot risk this machine having a hiccup. We also may be tied to an older release for quite some time, until the new hardware arrives and then we get whatever Perl comes on the RH Enterprise install.

So, a hand-wired CSV solution is sought by those of us not in a position to "simply ppm or CPAN Text::CSV into place". Good material is sparse - even the CookBook example isn't all that great. I did track down a regex which I have needed to follow up with several checks and edits to patch things up...

This then is a starting point (ugly/rough code): 

my @inList = split /,(?!(?:[^",]|[^"],[^"])+")/;
# and further on a bit of a mess:
my @outList = ();
for (my $i=0; $i<$flds; $i++) {
  if (! defined $inList[$i] ) {
    $inList[$i] = ""; 
  }
  if ($inList[$i] =~ m/\D/) {
    $inList[$i] = '"'.$inList[$i].'"'; 
  }
  $inList[$i] =~ s/^""/"/;
  $inList[$i] =~ s/""$/"/;
  $inList[$i] =~ s/^"$/""/;
  push @outList, $inList[$i];
}

[download]

I eventually got to a point with my data that I simply sanitize all the crap in a field like ",", "'" and """ in self defense, straight after dealing with any nulls.

I hope this is useful for someone.

In reply to Re^3: Converting CSV to tab-delimited by Anonymous Monk
in thread Converting CSV to tab-delimited by PhilHibbs

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.