[nrdvana]

It's a nice tidy CSV parser, but needs a new title. "world's smallest" is never going to happen in C#, for any measure of "smallest". And aside from that, nobody should be rolling their own CSV parsers if they want to solve real-world problems; use the most capable library your language offers you, which will account for a hundred edge cases yours doesn't.

[xamuel]

Funny story re "nobody should be rolling":

When I was switching from academia to industry, I decided, based on HN comments like this, that I should un-publish my CSV parser.

I was worried potential employers would tsk-tsk me for self-rolling.

I promptly got an email from the creator of Ruby asking me why I had un-published my CSV parser, which apparently was being used in Ruby at the time.

(...And then later I landed my current job, a dream job, a large part of which involves handling CSV files in finance!)

[nrdvana]

Well, it depends if your self-rolled version is a complete library, or a quick sidetrack you implemented as a bigger project. If you published it as an installable independent library, and Ruby was using it, I think it's safe to say that you had a complete product. The evil of self-rolled CSV is that people often build on an incomplete understanding of the problem, don't have unit tests, or do something simplistic that necessitates workarounds like this: https://metacpan.org/pod/Data::TableReader::Decoder::IdiotCS...

(case in point, that crazy workaround is only possible because of a large expenditure of effort by the authors of perl's Text::CSV which very few CSV parsers would have implemented)