Review of Jesse Phillips's CSV Parser

[Don]

On 02.11.2011 09:02, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> 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.

Far more horrible than that -- in an old Excel from around 2000 the user 
interface used US settings for reading short dates, if the day of the 
month was 12 or less. Otherwise it uses the locale. But it always uses 
the locale for displaying them.

So 11/1, 12/1, 13/1 gets changed to 1 Nov, 1 Dec, 13 Jan.

I wrote a macro called "November 9" (9/11) for swapping them back if 
they were in the buggy range.