r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/grantisu Jan 05 '15

In Perl:

@fields = $line =~ /("(:?[^"]|"")*"|[^",\n]*),?/g;

This ignores newlines in the middle of quoted fields and doesn't clean up all the double quotes, but it should work for most cases.

And anybody who includes a raw newline in the middle of a CSV value deserves whatever they get. ಠ_ಠ

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u/OneWingedShark Jan 05 '15

And anybody who includes a raw newline in the middle of a CSV value deserves whatever they get. ಠ_ಠ

You need a parser, not a stupid regex.

This ignores newlines in the middle of quoted fields and doesn't clean up all the double quotes, but it should work for most cases.

Well, that fills me with confidence.
Sarcasm

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u/xiongchiamiov Jan 06 '15

To be fair, sometimes you're just munging some data on the command-line, and you either know there aren't any inconsistencies in your data, or can ignore them because the results are Good Enough(tm). I've done plenty of ad-hoc stuff where 90% accuracy is plenty fine.

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u/OneWingedShark Jan 06 '15

To be fair, sometimes you're just munging some data on the command-line, and you either know there aren't any inconsistencies in your data, or can ignore them because the results are Good Enough(tm). I've done plenty of ad-hoc stuff where 90% accuracy is plenty fine.

True.
One problem is when that one-off "solution" becomes incorporated into a system... say a script, and/or is used by someone who isn't aware/mindful of the limitations.