[jimeh]

Personally I know the pain of creating a CSV parser. In late 2006 I was working on a PHP project that required a CSV parser, and what was available at the time did not come close to cutting it. So I created my own parser/generator, which among many other things included automatic delimiter character detection. It was a rather painful project to create, but I learned a lot, and found the experience really fun.

Overall I agree with the article, there's no point in reinventing the wheel if there are libraries out there. And CSV specifically is a horribly complex format to deal with. But sometimes rolling your own is the best and/or only choice you have, and you might come out the other end enjoying the experience, and having learned a lot.

As for what happened to my old CSV parser? It ended up being quite popular, but stuck in the dark ages as I'd mostly moved on from PHP years ago. But thanks to a contributor, we've recently put renewed effort into bringing the project in to modern times: https://github.com/parsecsv/parsecsv-for-php