Advice on handling malformed CSV with FasterCSV

[Wes Gamble]

All,

FasterCSV 1.0.0
Ruby 1.8.4

I am writing functionality to replace an an older system. Part of this
system accepts uploaded CSV files, parses, and displays their contents.
When confronted with a file including one line that looks like this:

"data",'otherdata"

the legacy app. happily parses this into two fields with values data and
otherdata.

However, FasterCSV fails because of the quote mismatch on the 2nd field
and throws a MalformedCSVError when you attempt to manipulate the object
returned from FasterCSV.open().

I've taken a look at the code and I can see where the quote matching is
enforced and so I have a pretty good idea of how to "fix" this (which I
am only even considering because I'm trying to match the legacy
functionality).

I need some advice. My questions are:

1) Is there a way to get FasterCSV to accept input like the above? How
can I set up a custom parsing scheme?
2) Should I modify the FasterCSV parser directly to accept this sort of
input?
3) Should I pre-process the file to eliminate/modify these sorts of
cases to improve the likelihood of a successful FasterCSV parse?

Thanks,
Wes

 

[Wes Gamble]

I strongly recommend that you normalize the database to conform to CSV
conventions, before performing any processing. This is much to be
preferred
to rewriting a standard library in such a way that it accepts the
malformed
data.

I agree.

Thanks, Paul.

Wes