Re: [bug-gawk] Tentative CSV extension - please advise

[Miriam English]

address@hidden wrote:

> Yes. That's getting too messy.  Instead such an extension should simply define
> a csvsplit() function.
>
> The big problem is embedded newlines in the fields.  Sigh. If not for that
> we could deal with this issue much more easily...

If the fields are preprocessed by turning
"the quick
brown fox"
into
"the quick\nbrown fox"
then it becomes much easier. Then after fields are extracted the escaped 
characters can be returned to their literals.

It would be slightly simplified using something similar to what sed 
recently has done in adding the -z option, where the input "line" is 
delimited by a zero byte instead of a newline. I often use that to 
process entire files as a single line, treating newlines as just another 
character.

It reduces the problem to working out which newlines end a csv record 
and shouldn't be escaped.



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