If reading from a stream, please forget about parse () and fields (). The two are combined a lot faster and more efficient into getline () when working in streams.

open my $fh, "<", "file.csv" or die "file.csv: $!\n";
while (my $row = $csv->getline ($fh)) {
    $row->[8] =~ m/criterium/ or next;
    # do something with this line
    }
$csv->eof or $csv->error_diag ();
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I think that snippet (and one for ouput) should be added to the top of the Synopsis, if not replace the current content of the Synopsis.

The example is already in the docs since ages, and has been moved up to be the first in this diff in May. I don't know if that section could be even more clear than it already is.

Note however that this is the documentation of Text::CSV_XS, and that this EXAMPLES section is not in the docs of Text::CSV.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

getline

...It reads a row from the IO object $io using $io->getline () and parses this row into an array ref. This array ref is returned by the function or undef for failure.

This object function decomposes a CSV string into fields, returning success or failure. Failure can result from a lack of argument or the given CSV string is improperly formatted. Upon success, fields () can be called to retrieve the decomposed fields . Upon failure, the value returned by fields () is undefined and error_input () can be called to retrieve the invalid argument

It installed fine for me just now using ppm:

C:\Documents and Settings\jnorton>ppm install Text::CSV
Downloading ActiveState Package Repository packlist...not modified
Downloading Text-CSV-1.13...done
Unpacking Text-CSV-1.13...done
Generating HTML for Text-CSV-1.13...done
Updating files in site area...done
   4 files installed
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Even though your original post provides only a single line:

$colref = $csv->getline ($io);
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(which you really cannot expect to be enough information, can you?!!), at least you provide an almost complete example by your 3rd post.  (I say "almost", because it still doesn't tell us what's in your data file "gridall.csv".  But no matter, we'll figure that out).

So let's try running your program.  The only changes I've made are removing some blank lines, consolodating the text in the pring statements, and adding use strict; and use warnings; (which you have been told about many times before, but still seem oblivous to the purpose for -- just because you can't see the errors in your program doesn't mean they're not there!):