Help with FasterCSV monkey patch

[Alfredo Mesen]

Hello, I've been trying to monkey patch FCSV to allow escaped colsep
characters within a field:

FCSV.parse "here\\, it is, other fields" #need: [["here\\, it is",
"other fields"]]
^

So what I tried was modifying the :csv_row regexp on the init_parsers
method


1797: ([^#{esc_quote}#{esc_col_sep}]*) # unquoted fields


which I changed with this:

1797: ((?>[^#{esc_quote}#{esc_col_sep}]*
1798: \\#{esc_col_sep}
1799: [^#{esc_quote}#{esc_col_sep}]*)*) # unquoted fields

This didn't work though , though my gut tells me I'm close

Thanks in advance for any help with this

 

[Gregory Brown]

Hello, I've been trying to monkey patch FCSV to allow escaped colsep
characters within a field:

FCSV.parse "here\\, it is, other fields" #need: [["here\\, it is",
"other fields"]]
^

Is there a reason why you can't use normal CSV quoted text escaping?
=> [["here, it is", " other fields"]]

-greg

 

[Alfredo Mesen]

Is there a reason why you can't use normal CSV quoted text escaping?
=> [["here, it is", " other fields"]]

-greg

Unfortunately yes, the parsing on the app I'm working on has to be
foolproof, allowing such otherwise-invalid format.

 

[James Gray]

Hello, I've been trying to monkey patch FCSV to allow escaped colsep
characters within a field:

FCSV.parse "here\\, it is, other fields" #need: [["here\\, it is",
"other fields"]]

My advice is don't do this, unfortunately.

I've tried to add this feature to FasterCSV multiple times now. It's
very hard and I haven't been able to find a good way to do it for
general cases. I fully admit this is a failing of FasterCSV, it's
very dependent on the proper CSV format.

You probably have three reasonable choices:

* Feed FasterCSV a line at a time, rescue the MalformedCSVError, and
switch strategies on those lines
* Preprocess all lines to be sure they are valid CSV and then hand
them off
* Build your own parser

Sorry I wasn't more help.

James Edward Gray II