@Josh, most of the time I can manage to steer away from multiline records but with gov. organisations it is difficult to alter what they have considered as a 'standard'.
Can you please elaborate on your idea for named records/rows? @Harsh, thanks for the references. I remember I had some issues with OpenCSV (either the iterator suport or some RFC4180 limitations). But I would check the other sources. Thanks, Chris On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Harsh J <ha...@cloudera.com> wrote: > Does OpenCSV (http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/#what-features) support > your format? There's a Hive wrapper for it: > http://ogrodnek.github.com/csv-serde and IIRC also a newer InputFormat > at https://github.com/mvallebr/CSVInputFormat (via > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-2208). > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Christian Tzolov > <christian.tzo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I am working on ETL projects that consume and produce data in the RFC4180 > > [1] CSV format. Although unreliable IMO, this RFC is used as an exchange > > format by several Dutch government agencies. > > > > The RFC4180 spec supports multi-line fields (e.g. fields with line > > breaks) and escaping of double quotes and delimiters within fields. > Because > > of the multi-line feature one can't use directly the > > FileInputFormat/TextInputFormat or LineRecordReader implementations. > > Furthermore as I see it the input splitting must be disabled (not sure if > > any efficient splitting strategy is possible at all). > > > > There are several java libraries that provide some RFC4180 support [3]. > For > > Pig a slightly modified CSVExcelStorage UDF [2] seems to do the job (not > > sure about the input splitting though). Also the "Hadoop in Practice" > > example [4] does not support the multi-line fields. > > > > Has someone used similar 'multi-line fields' formats? I wonder how common > > is this use case. > > > > Also shall we provide support for it in Crunch? > > > > Cheers, > > Chris > > > > [1] RFC 4180 - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 > > [2] PIG CVSExcelStorage UDF - > > > http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/pig/trunk/contrib/piggybank/java/src/main/java/org/apache/pig/piggybank/storage/CSVExcelStorage.java > > [3] jCSV, OpenCSV, SuperCSV > > [4] > > > https://github.com/alexholmes/hadoop-book/blob/master/src/main/java/com/manning/hip/ch3/csv/CSVInputFormat.java > > > > -- > Harsh J >
