Review of Jesse Phillips's CSV Parser

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-11-01 02:28, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:21:02 +0200, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:18:27 +0300, dsimcha<dsimcha at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> Docs:
>>> http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/D/doc/phobos/std_csv.html
>>
>> Checked the new docs today. If I'm reading them right, the top example
>> prints:
>>
>> "Fred works as a Fly and earns $4 per year"
>>
>> Is this a pop culture reference I'm not catching?
>
> No, not that I know of. Should it be? Should I go with a more
> professional like example?
>
>> An idea I had the other day was to include convenience presets for the
>> more common flavours of CSV formats, e.g.: csvText!CSVFormat_Excel(...)
>
> Well if Excel actually conforms to what it claims:
>
> http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-formatting-and-
> features-that-are-not-transferred-to-other-file-formats-HP010014105.aspx?
> CTT=5&origin=HP010099725#BM4
>
> Which I doubt it does, then my parser already defaults to being able to
> read such formats. In my experience Excel sucks at CSV and follows no
> rules.
>
> The implementation I choose as default is the most common and any other
> style is just a butchafication and likely to be unreliable, usually stems
> from "my data has commas, so I'll use colon." Which is great until the
> data also has colon. But maybe that is just my experience.

Excel + CSV == Pain in the ass

Excel uses different value delimiters as the default setting depending 
on the locale of the Excel application.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg