CSV Parser, with and without encapsulation

[tosaiju]

Dear Monks,

Which is the best CSV parser?
I tried using Text::CSV - which works good for any Standard CSV records.
Recently I got a problem where in a file - the records are sometimes encapsulated and sometimes not. Can we handle this in one Parser. Also intrestingly this worked for me while using Text-CSV v1.13; but failed when using Text-CSV v1.21.

The secnario what I have is something like below,
field1,field2,some desc with inch 10",field3
field1,field2,soem desc,field3
field1,field2,"some desc with sep, and other",field3

CSV object was set with encapsulation(") and this works well while using Text-CSV v1.13, but not with Text-CSV v1.21
Appreciate your views.

Many Thanks,

[Anonymous Monk]

I'm pretty sure Text::CSV can handle it, you just have to flip on the appropriate options -- finding the options is left as an exercise to whomever is interested ( maybe [ddg://site:perlmonks.org Text::CSV allow_loose_quotes] -> Recommendations for parsing invalid CSV )

[Anonymous Monk]

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-CSV_XS/MANIFEST

examples/csv2xls	Script to onvert CSV files to M$Excel
examples/csv-check	Script to check a CSV file/stream
examples/csvdiff	Script to shoff diff between sorted CSV files
examples/parser-xs.pl	Parse CSV stream, be forgiving on bad lines

[tosaiju]

Thanks, this really helped. Now the only problem might be if escape_char is same as quote_char. Hope all valid/invalid things will not happen in 1 file.

[Tux]

The "best" is of course Text::CSV_XS :)

Text::CSV is just a wrapper over Text::CSV_XS and/or Text::CSV_PP.

If your CSV data is mixed and invalid, chances are that you might not find a combination of options that will work on all records, but a good start for what you describe would be something like:

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({
    binary             => 1,
    allow_loose_quotes => 1,
    escape_char        => undef,
    auto_diag          => 1,
    });

Please carefully read the manual for all allow_*** options.