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A comment on Time to retire the CSV?. Parent comment

Re:Time to retire the CSV? by Macha on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @12:40PM (#28223719)
It also doesn't prevent a human or other system doing:

cat input1.csv input2.csv > output.csv

resulting in a single file containing multiple formats.

Also, what variant is this:

    1,5,Here is a string "" that does stuff,2021-1-1
What is the value of the third column?

Is this a CSV file without quoting? Then it's

    Here is a string "" that does stuff
Or is it a CSV file with double quote escaping? Then it's

    Here is a string " that does stuff
This is fundamentally undecidable without knowledge of what the format it is.

You can decide to just assume RFC compliant CSVs in the event of ambiguity, but then you absolutely will get bugs from users with non-RFC compliant CSV files.

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Re:Time to retire the CSV? by godshatter on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @04:46PM (#28226885)
That's true. You could scan the file and see if there are any other types of double quote escaping happening, but if there isn't any that wouldn't help either. It's also negated by the multiple formats in the same file point.

So, yeah. Can't really be done without making too many assumptions that will break later.

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