* separated values

[Michael Hudson]

rmunn at pobox.com (Robin Munn) writes:

> On Tue, 15 Jan 2002 16:53:09 +0300, Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru> wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 01:42:10PM +0000, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> >> Basically, what I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to add
> >> such a beast to the standard library. It seems like a very natural
> >> format to support, doesn't it?
> >
> >   I don't think so.
> 
> I do. I once needed to translate a couple of .csv files to another
> format, and started out writing my own parser since "it'll be simple,
> right?" Discovered there are several subtleties that make it not
> particularly easy, decided someone must have already invented this
> wheel, and found a csv parser on-line. Not too much time wasted, but if
> it had been in the standard library, I wouldn't have wasted *any* time
> at all.

I thought this was the problem; there are so many fiddly variants on
csv that it would be impossible to standardise on one for inclusion in
the standard library.  "that's the great things about standards --
there are so many to choose from!"

Might be wrong, of course.

CHeers,
M.

-- 
3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
  -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html