Re: [TxMt] Regular expression conundrum (CSV)

On Feb 22, 2007, at 11:18 AM, Fritz Anderson wrote:

I'm out of ideas. Does anybody have a suggestion?

I can tell you from experience that it's impossible to correctly parse all valid CSV with just one regular expression. The second edition of Mastering Regular Expressions gives an example pattern that gets very close, but I've found edge cases it fails on.

You can do it with as little as two regular expressions though. If you want to see how, you can examine the source of my FasterCSV Ruby library:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/fastercsv

It is a regular expression based parser.

James Edward Gray II