in reply to Parsing user input into CSV table

Why on earth would you want to store HTML pages in a CSV file? You don't plan on serving them up from this one CSV file, do you?

Well, I'd advise you to not use CSV and instead use DBI with a real relational database backend like MySQL or PostgreSQL... But I'm guessing you can't, because if you could, you'd already be doing that instead, right? :)

Ok, well, to mess around with CSV you'd want to use either Text::CSV (with an optional C backend) or DBI with DBD::CSV. Either one of them can handle any needed comma escaping for you. If you only have a handful of these pages, storing them separately on disk really is not a bad idea. If you have a lot of these pages, another better, faster, easier solution than CSV is storing the stuff in some big hash where each key is--I don't know--a page name or section name, and then each value is the corresponding HTML code. Then you serialize it, storing the hash itself to disk that way it can be quickly loaded in the future, using DB_File (my favorite) or some other DBM module (like MLDBM).

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Re: Re: Parsing user input into CSV table
by lwicks (Friar) on Apr 14, 2004 at 11:29 UTC
    Hmmm....

    Really all I want to do is store plain text, the writing of the authors. HTML is just for formating as it will be presented as a web application using IE or a good browser. ;-)

    Each "Page" is roughly the length of a page of typed text, if that. The big problem is not the HTML but the commas as in the following example:

    This is a example of the problem, this kills it!

    This is entered by hand into a textarea box and kills things. I could just write some regex to swap commas for appropriate code but was/am hoping to find a better writtehn/better tested solution. I.e. as I said earlier, I don't want to re-invent the wheel here.

    Thanks for the comments,
    LANCE

    Kia Kaha, Kia Toa, Kia Manawanui!
    Be Strong, Be Brave, Be perservering!
[reply]

      Well, if you really want plain text, then Text::CSV will work fine. It appears to handle comma escaping fine. DBD::CSV is probably overkill, as you don't seem to need SQL. I'd still at least consider DBM, though.

[reply]
      Further investigation shows that the problem is in fact not commas or html tags etc. Rather newlines.

      So whats the "help the noobie" suggestion for stripping the newline characters from the scaler?

      Lance

      Kia Kaha, Kia Toa, Kia Manawanui!
      Be Strong, Be Brave, Be perservering!
[reply]

        The "help the noobie" suggestion is to use some already-existing CSV module and let it handle this for you :) Unfortunately, Text::CSV doesn't handle newlines at all. It *could* escape them, but for some reason, it doesn't--it just silently fails when passed newlines.

        Our fellow Monk Tilly has written Text::xSV, which offers a much better interface to CSV than Text::CSV does. It can handle commas and newlines, and provides more file-oriented routines to store the resulting CSV and load it later on: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-xSV. Great solution.

[reply]
        I think I found the answer here 84423
        Opinions?

        Kia Kaha, Kia Toa, Kia Manawanui!
        Be Strong, Be Brave, Be perservering!
[reply]

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