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Hi, Thanks for your thoughts. As I have stated elsewhere, the code handles all of the cases I needed it to handle, due to the stability of the input file format (which was emitted from another program). I don't see that this should be too hard to believe. I also said in my second edit, on the top line, 'Not so trivial after all!'. If I was putting on some kind of act, wouldn't that have been dropping it? Further, I noted in my first edit, before I had received any replies, that I 'know this version won't support escaped separator/newline characters', so I am not sure what you were trying to add with your example? I think that my central point (and I totally accept that I didn't express this well) is that depending on the specifications of your program, the required CSV parser /can be/ very short. When one compares this to other data exchange formats, for example JSON, it is clear that the barrier to /entry/ is much lower. The shortest JSON parser I could find with a cursory look was 200 lines of C. I totally appreciate that to write a CSV parser that works for all cases would be extremely longwinded. It has been interesting to hear other people's experiences and opinions about that. But the fact remains true that /in some cases/, depending on the requirements of the program, the parser can be very short. > We all recognize the classic developer I-could-build-that-in-a-weekend hubris when we see it. :) It is funny you should say this. I needed the CSV parser because I thought it would be fun and interesting to see if I could build an anti-malware tool in a week (I am taking a malware detection class at the moment, I wanted it done before the next lecture). I did not expect I would be able to have anything good working in that time, but by the early hours of the next morning I had a perfectly functional anti-malware tool. It can use ClamAV signatures (so it can detect everything(?) that ClamAV can), runs in parallel, has a nice text console with DSL, and is fast enough (processing 210k small files in ~5 minutes, checking against ~60k sigs). It is about 650 lines of Erlang (including comments). I am saying this not to boast(!), but to make the point that I greatly underestimated how productive I could be, beat my expectations by many fold, then people comment about my hubris online the next day. It is funny how life goes! Thanks, Sam |