From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <447EF168.10209@comtv.ru>
Date: Thu,  1 Jun 2006 17:53:44 +0400
From: Victor Nazarov <vir@comtv.ru>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] csv files -> embarrasing
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Steve Simon wrote:

>Ok, I have spent half an hour trying to parse CSV files
>and it's getting embarrasing, I could do it in C but I should
>be able to use rc + sed + awk.
>
>The problem is that some of my CSV files fields contain whitespace
>and thus have double quotes around them.
>
>I thought rc knows about %q quotes strings so I could use it to
>do my parsing, but it fails, can this be done, or is C the answer?
>seems a shame to resort to sledge hammers.
>
>-Steve
>
>cpu% cat file.csv
>a,b,"c,d,e",f,g
>p,q,r,s,t
>
>cpu%
>cpu% cat extract
>#!/bin/rc
>
>sed 's/"([^"]*)"/''\1''/g; s/,/ /g' $* |
>	while (s=`{read})
>		echo $s(1) $s(3) $s(4)
>
>
>cpu% extract file.csv
>a 'c d
>p r s
>
>
>  
>
Thought about this case today. In native Plan9 the solution is quite easy.
Programs share environment and this is the answer:

sed 's/"([^"]*)"/''\1''/g; s/,/ /g' $* |
	while (s=`{read}) {
		echo 's=('$"s')' | rc
		echo $s(1) $s(3) $s(4)
        }