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From: Ed Morton <mortonspam@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.awk
Subject: Re: [gawk] Handling variants of CSV input data formats
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2024 06:26:26 -0500
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On 8/25/2024 1:00 AM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> Myself I'm usually not using CSV format(s), but recently I advertised
> GNU Awk (given that newer versions support CSV data processing) to a
> friend seeking CSV solutions.
> 
> I was quite astonished when I stumbled across a StackOverflow article
> about CSV processing with contemporary versions of GNU Awk and read
> that you are restricted to comma as separator and double quotes to
> enclose strings. The workarounds provided at SO were extremely clumsy.
> 
> Given that using ',', ';', '|' (or other delimiters) and also various
> types of quotes are just a lexical (no functional) difference I wonder
> whether it would be sensible to be able to define them, say, through
> setting a PROCINFO element?
> 
> Janis
> 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45420535/whats-the-most-robust-way-to-efficiently-parse-csv-using-awk
> 

FYI gawk just inherited those behaviors (plus mandatory stripping of the 
quotes from quoted fields, see 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2023-11/msg00018.html) from 
Kernighans awk.

	Ed.