On 2007-07-06, Neil Cerutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2007-07-05, John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Jul 6, 5:31 am, Neil Cerutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>> Mostly you can use the default 'excel' dialect and be quite >>> happy, since Excel is the main reason anybody still cares about >>> this unecessarily hard to parse (it requires more than one >>> character of lookahead for no reason except bad design) data >>> format. >> >> One cares about this format because people create data files of >> millions of rows (far exceeding the capacity of Excel (pre-2007)) in >> many imaginative xSV dialects, some of which are not handled by the >> Python csv module. >> >> I don't know what you mean by "requires more than one >> character of lookahead" > > It's because of the silly way that quotes are quoted in quoted > fields. > > "a,""b",c > > But I'm not a parsing expert by any means.
Moreover, the most common version of csv uses both escape and shift codes, when only escape codes were really needed, and then compounds this stupidity by using the same character for escaping and shifting. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
