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Re: How to parse CSV
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Re: How to parse CSV


  • Subject: Re: How to parse CSV
  • From: Ed Stockly <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:01:48 -0800

>>>> think that's a bit harsh and have found CSV to be reliable and consistent, though I'm willing to accept that I may have led a sheltered life ;-)

>>>I've always found CSV to use:
>>>"," between items on the same row new line (return or linefeed) to start a new row quotes (") around items that contain a comma or new line
>>>"" to escape a quote within quotes
>>>"." in decimals


If you're working with CSV files that contain only numbers (not counting the first row or first column) then CSV is a fine format that's easy to work with.

We download CSV files every week that also contain text, but the text is built without commas, tabs or quotes, so those are easy to parse. (In fact, I had to dig out this script from my archives, turns out it was written for Mac OS 8.x, haven't looked at it for years and the user is still using it in Tiger, the only change was to open it in Script Editor and save it as a Cocoa applet, to eliminate the need for classic.)

If your data contains text with new lines, commas and quotes it becomes a major headache.

But, since you're using AppleScript, you can use other programs to handle the heavy lifting.

As others have suggested, you can open the CSV file in Excel, and either save as TSV, XML or simply extract the data from the Excel document.

Directly parsing CSV in pure AppleScript could be done, but it would be a major headache.

ES
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