From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <c22c600f644b0141b2bf9b93b912407e@quintile.net>
From: "Steve Simon" <steve@quintile.net>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:36:11 +0100
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
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Subject: [9fans] csv files -> embarrasing
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4a0f70de-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

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