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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CSV-82?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13238343#comment-13238343
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Emmanuel Bourg commented on CSV-82:
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I don't find this inconsistent. There are two cases to handle:
# The header is missing and a field is accessed by name
# The header is present but the column name requested doesn't exist
In case 1 an IllegalStateException is thrown, because the expectation of the
user is severely broken. He attempts to access the fields by name which is
completely impossible.
In case 2 a null value is returned, because some column may be optional. It's
not reasonable to throw an exception in this case, otherwise reading optional
columns in a try catch block will become very cumbersome.
If you want to differentiate between missing columns and null values this can
be done with a CSVRecord#has(String) method. But is it actually useful?
> CSVRecord inconsistent behaviour when header mapping is not found
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CSV-82
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CSV-82
> Project: Commons CSV
> Issue Type: Bug
> Reporter: Sebb
>
> The CSVRecord#get(String) method has inconsistent behaviour.
> If no header mapping was provided, then it throws IllegalStateException.
> If the header name is not found, null is returned.
> Apart from being inconsistent, it might be useful in the future to be able to
> return null as a column value (as distinct from the empty string).
> It should throw IllegalArgumentException for a missing header name, instead
> of returning null.
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