Re: Text::CSV

[dkubb]

This is an excellent module, but I prefer to use Text::CSV_XS.

It's an XS based module, and is quite fast, definately the fastest perl module for manipulating quote-comma files on CPAN, that I have heard of.

It has an identical interface to Text::CSV, meaning all would have to do a s/Text::CSV/Text::CSV_XS/g on the source file, and it should work the same.

[Anonymous Monk]

I had problems with both those modules when I tried them. The rules for escaping quotes and spaces within a CSV record are very clear, but the modules don't handle all the cases correctly. Every data file would die on some record.. that was legal, but which the modules wouldn't handle correctly. I ended up writing my own state-machine parser for CSV, first splitting the record into characters etc, just as I would do it in C.. it took me a couple of hours to code and test, but as I had already wasted many days messing with broken modules I considered it time well spent. -Ben M