Richard, I don't know if this will be helpful, but I faced this problem with a project a year ago. In my case, I had the data in an Excel file and wanted to export it to a tab-del text file, to be read by my MC app. I believe even tab-delimited files will get the extra quotes around fields that contain commas, so I did a search-and-replace in Excel to find all of the real quotes and replace them with something like "{{". After exporting from Excel, I knew that any quotes that appeared were put there by Excel and could be removed by my application. I then replaced "{{" with quotes, and I was back in business.
Here's a piece of the actual code: replace quote with "" in gMasterList -- remove quotes inserted by Excel replace "{{" with quote in gMasterList -- replace orig quotes replace tab & space with tab in gMasterList -- remove leading spaces replace space & tab with tab in gMasterList -- remove trailing spaces That may be just the type of kludge you're trying to avoid, but I offer it up in case there's a kernel of an idea you can build on. regards, Craig Spooner >Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 14:22:53 -0700 >From: Richard Gaskin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Stupid CSV tricks >To: MetaCard List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >Some implementations of the CSV format do not consistenly use >comma-separated values. Microsoft products and others use a comma only for >numeric values, with all others designated as text by enclosing them in >quotes, effectively using a quote-comma-quote delimiter. > >To make parsing such files even more of a challenge, a quoted string can >contain any character, including commas and returns. > >I've tried a number of algorithms for parsing these files efficiently, and >even explored the issue wih Ken Ray and others, and the only robust >algorithm we've come up with yet is one which walks through each of the >characters to determine what is a delimiter and wha is part of the data. > >I'd like to find a faster method, but thus far all attempts at using the >replace command and replacetext function have fallen short in one way or >another. > >Considering the ubiquity of this format, I would imagine I'm not the first >MetaTalker needed to parse CSV. Anyone found an algorithm faster that >walking through the chars? > >-- > Richard Gaskin > Fourth World Media Corporation > Custom Software and Web Development for All Major Platforms > Developer of WebMerge 2.0: Publish any Database on Any Site > ___________________________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com > Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard