lbruun edited a comment on pull request #51: URL: https://github.com/apache/commons-csv/pull/51#issuecomment-743715066
@divijvaidya. The PR is what it is and is complete. However, since time has now passed the PR now has a minor merge conflict. Also my changes to Javadoc states (for this new feature) "since 1.8" which seemed reasonable at the time because it was the (then) upcoming release and I was hoping the maintainers would include my PR for that release. Version 1.8 has since then been released _without_ this PR so that would need to be changed in the PR. Anyway, my main problem is that I haven't been able to explain to maintainers of this library why this is a missing feature in the library. In short why the library should be able to distinguish between (when parsing): ```text 545-03-1234,"","Doe" ``` and ```text 545-03-1234,,"Doe" ``` ..and why the existing feature, `org.apache.commons.csv.CSVFormat.nullString`, doesn't address this problem. You can see the explanation and discussion [here](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CSV-253?focusedCommentId=16962105&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-16962105). Note that once maintainer(s) of the library agree to the problem being present then the next discussion is obviously _how_ to address it. My suggestion in this PR favors strict backwards compatibility (no breaking change) : I simply introduce a new attribute rather than changing what the existing attribute `nullString` does. This will probably be confusing for users of the library, but the alternative - breaking change - is worse IMHO. I'll be glad to update the PR if I thought it had chance of being accepted. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected]
