On Aug 23, 2006, at 3:37 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:
L.S.,
Reading and writing a comma seperated datafile doesn't have to be that complicated; the following is an easy way to read a CSV file into a list of tuples and display the list on screen:
"For every complex problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong." -- HL Mencken Although it seems straightforward at first, CSV suffers from text escaping complexities, just as does every other general purpose plain- text encoding. Most notably, a newline embedded inside double quotes does not end a record. These issues cause ugly corner cases if you aren't expecting them. And that's just the issues with moving tables of strings around; if those fields have non-string interpretations (dates or numbers or what have you), things get really hairy. To do the "right thing" probably requires perl-ish duck typing :-p See http://www.creativyst.com/Doc/Articles/CSV/CSV01.htm for a semi- authoritative reference on CSV. A related RFC is here: http:// tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 Rob Dockins Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank. Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank. -- TMBG