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Re: hash from CSV-like structure

by doom (Deacon)
on Jan 04, 2008 at 22:59 UTC ( [id://660481]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to hash from CSV-like structure

Maybe this problem is an exception to the rule (because you're talking about "CSV-like" data, and not just "CSV"), but in general it's a really bad idea to try to roll your own CSV processing with regular expressions. CSV seems very simple, so you tend to think it'll be eaisier to just do it yourself, but there are enough odd little corner-cases that you're almost guaranteed to do something wrong (e.g. do you allow items with commas inside them if they're quoted correctly? if you allow quotes inside of a quoted item, how do you escape the embedded quotes? Is it okay to allow spaces after the commas? If you do, does that break someone else's CSV parsing?).

When last I looked into this, your best bet was to use Text::CSV_XS (or DBD::CSV, which uses it internally), though you need to know that you always want to use the "binary" option (i.e. they got the default wrong).

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Re^2: hash from CSV-like structure
by jZed (Prior) on Jan 05, 2008 at 07:29 UTC
    A couple of minor quibles : DBD::CSV defaults to having binary on when it calls Text::CSV_XS, and while it's good advice to turn binary on by default, it really isn't true that "you always want to use the binary option" since there are several CSV formats which you *want* to fail if they encounter embedded newlines. I was tempted to point the OP to one of those modules too, but this data has no embedding and would need to have its terminal field separator chomped so doing it by hand seems just as good for this one particular case.

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