[version_five]

Commas are easy if it's quoted. I just first run an awk script that uses " as the field separator and substitutes or deletes commas in odd numbered fields (as long as that's acceptable for your use case). Then with `-F,` I always check that NF is the same for all lines in the csv before proceeding.

Depending on how the xml is structured, it can be possible to just pattern match on the tags if you have something simple to do.

[dc-programmer]

Yes this is it. I patterned matched on tags to create a simple state machine. Then I extracted values using splitlines on commas and quotes