On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 05:00:24PM +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 12:57 -0400, Paul M Foster wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 04:15:33PM +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 12:12 -0400, Paul M Foster wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 08:57:00AM -0700, Tommy Pham wrote:
> >
<snip>
> > Explode won't work in the case of a comma in a field value.
>
> That's why I convert the files to tab-delimited first. explode() does
> work in that case.
>
> >
> > Also, newlines can exist within a field value, so a line in the
> file doesn't
> > equate to a row of data
>
> I've never seen this in the files I receive.
>
> >
> > The best way is just to start parsing at the beginning of the file
> and break it
> > into fields one by one from there.
> >
> > The bit I don't like about characters other than a comma being used
> in a "comma
> > separated values" file is that you can't automatically tell what
> character has
> > been used as the delimiter. Hence being asked by spreadsheet programs
> what the
> > delimiter is if a comma doesn't give up what it recognises as valid
> fields.
>
> I've honestly never seen a "CSV" or "Comma-separated
> Values" which used
> tabs for delimiters. At that point, it's really not a *comma* separated
> value file.
>
> My application for all this is accepting mailing lists from customers
> which I have to convert into DBFs for a commercial mailing list program.
> Because most of my customers can barely find the on/off switch on their
> computers, I never know what I'm going to get. So before I string
> together the filters to process the file, I have to actually look at and
> analyze the file to find out what it is. Could be a fixed-field length
> file, a CSV, a tab-delimited file, or anything in between. Once I've
> selected the filters, the sequence they will be put together in, and the
> fields from the file I want to capture, I hit the button. After it's all
> done, I now have to look at the result to ensure that the requested
> fields ended up where they were supposed to.
>
> Paul
>
> --
> Paul M. Foster
>
>
>
> But surely whatever character is used as the delimiter could be part of the
> fields value?
Well, remember I shove these into tab-delimited files. It does
occasionally happen that someone will slip a tab into a field. When that
happens, I can tell when the final result is off. Then I do a hex dump
of the file (in PHP) to determine if it actually is a tab. If so, I have
a filter I prepend to the line of filters which removes tabs from the
original CSV file. Then proceed as before.
Occasionally someone will send me a file in a "label" format which
contains \x0C characters or somesuch at page boundaries. I actually have
to look at the file and find out what they've inserted. I have filters
for most anything I find like that.
Paul
--
Paul M. Foster
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