Hi, Bo...
Not to be a complainer ;-) but the venerable new-csv.r also
shows what appears to be a bug in parse (or at least a discrepancy
between documented and actual behavior...)
Consider the "csv" file below, created by a Well-Known Spreadsheet
from a Large Redmond Company:
1,1/1/00,"""Moo!"" the cow uttered."
2,1/2/00,"He said ""That's no lady! That's my podiatrist!"""
3,1/3/00,"This ""bad"" data brought to you by MICROS~1."
4,1/4/00,"I'm now crying ""Uncle!"""
Notice that the third field of each line is enclosed in quotation
marks and that embedded quotation marks are rendered as *pairs* of
quotation marks. This can be demonstrated by looking at another
copy of the same file, but saved in ".prn" format -- plain printable
text.
1 1/1/00 "Moo!" the cow uttered.
2 1/2/00 He said "That's no lady! That's my podiatrist!"
3 1/3/00 This "bad" data brought to you by MICROS~1.
4 1/4/00 I'm now crying "Uncle!"
The problem is that
parse/all some-string simple-string
is described as breaking some-string into a block of sub-strings
delimited by occurrences of simple-string (and as ignoring any
"special" significance of characters in some-string -- such as
whitespace -- based on the presence of the /all refinement.
However, notice that the output of new-csv.r is the file:
["1" "1/1/00" "" "Moo!" " the cow uttered."]
["2" "1/2/00" "He said " "That's no lady! That's my podiatrist!" ""]
["3" "1/3/00" "This " "bad" " data brought to you by MICROS~1."]
["4" "1/4/00" "I'm now crying " "Uncle!" ""]
The erroneous number of fields per record result indicates that
parse/all is still special-casing the quotation marks, rather than
just treating them as plain data characters. As a result of this
glitch in the behavior of parse/all new-csv.r didn't produce the
expected result of
["1" "1/1/00" {"Moo!" the cow uttered.}]
["2" "1/2/00" {He said "That's no lady! That's my podiatrist!"}]
["3" "1/3/00" {This "bad" data brought to you by MICROS~1.}]
["4" "1/4/00" {I'm now crying "Uncle!"}]
(or its equivalent) with three fields per record, the most natural
interpretation of the original three-column spreadsheet.
-jn-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> princepawn,
>
> Attached you will find an example that should allow CSV conversion of a
> file of any length.
>
> Shocked and honored that simple old %convert-csv.r is one of the most
> popular scripts!
>
> Have fun!
>
> -Bo
>
> On 5-Sep-2000/12:52:36-7:00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >I was glancing at one of the most popular scripts at the REBOL archive and
>developed some questions:
> >
> >1- Is it possible to incrementally write to a file in REBOL?
> >2- Is it possible to append to a file in REBOL
> >3- This script seems in-efficient and memory wasteful: it reads and entire file
>into a temporary array and then converts the array. In Perl, I could do each
>conversion as I read in each line and write each line out after each conversion.
> >
> >REBOL [
> > Title: "Comma-Seperated-Values to REBOL converter"
> > Date: 16-Jun-1999
> > Author: "Bohdan Lechnowsky"
> > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > File: %convert-csv.r
> > Purpose: <lb>
> > Convert CSV files to REBOL blocks
> > <rb>
> > Category: [file util db text 2]
> >]
> >
> >csv: read/lines to-file ask "Filename to convert from CSV: "
> >
> >block: make block! 100
> >
> >headings: parse/all first csv ","
> >
> >foreach line next csv [append block parse/all line ","]
> >
> >save to-file ask "Filename to save to: " head insert/only block headings
> >
> >
> >Get your FREE Email and Voicemail at Lycos Communications at
> >http://comm.lycos.com
> >
> --
> Bohdan "Bo" Lechnowsky
> REBOL Adventure Guide
> REBOL Technologies 707-467-8000 (http://www.rebol.com)
> Download the REBOL Messaging Language
> The Official Source for REBOL Books (http://www.REBOLpress.com)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Name: new-csv.r
> new-csv.r Type: Plain Text (text/plain)
> Encoding: base64
