Re: CSV extension status

[Manuel Collado]

Hi, Andy.

Thank you very much for your thoroughly inspection of my convoluted 
code. I'll revise it according to your suggestions.

El 19/05/2021 a las 15:03, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> ..
> I'm not sure what happens when _csv_mode > 0. I guess it relies upon
> upon FPAT parsing in that case.

Yes.

> To be quite honest, I don't quite understand the explanations of how positive
> and negative CSVMODE approaches differ. The documentation includes much jargon
> that I don't understand: "fragments", "clean text", etc. Probably I'm missing
> something, but where are these terms defined?

They are not precise technical terms. Just common english words, I hope.

Clean text -> "Hello!", she said
CSV fragment -> """Hello!"", she said"

Can you suggest better terms? I've not found technical terms for these 
values in the CSV bibliography.

> For negative CSVMODE, it says:
> "CSVOFS must contain a character not used in the CSV input file. The default SUBSEP 
> character should work in almost all cases."
> So that's discouraging. This does not seem robust.

I think it is as robust as its use to emulate multidimensional arrays 
with linear arrays since the creation of AWK.

> But what are the drawbacks of the CSVMODE > 0 case?

It delivers what I call "CSV fragments", instead of the effective 
("clean text") data.

Regards.
--
Manuel Collado - http://mcollado.z15.es