[cafard]

I just attempted to run some government data through Python using the csv module. It worked like a charm, until it told me that a field had exceeded the maximum allowable length. A close look showed that a field began but did not end with a quotation mark. Using the csv.QUOTE_NONE flag resolved that, but did not remedy such quirks as short or long records.

CSV files, depending on who generates them, are a bit like dates if the status of a year as leap or not depended on whether the date of Easter were 0 mod 4.

[jsdwarf]

My gripe with the Python csv.reader module is that it has no skip_lines parameter. Ill-formatted lines at the top/bottom of a CSV file are quite common