Re: Supported/Bundled CSV support?

["T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>]

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Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:


Yes, you are correct.

There are modules like pcsv.el and  similarly named ones from the past
that do an approximate job -- when I looked into this approx 20 years
ago, I also ended up writing one of my own within Emacspeak --- in my
experience each of these hand-rolled csv parsers are differently broken
in their own way -- including the one in emacspeak, since as as I
pointed out in my earlier message, parsing various variants of CSV is
surprizingly hard.

>> I think having built-in CSV support that abstracts away the various
>> details of parsing the various CSV variants will allow the emacs Dev
>> community to focus on user solutions  e.g.:
>>
>> A. Seamless data import/export
>> B. Support the processing of larger amounts of data via org-table and the like
>> C. Json support vastly sped up modules like lsp and eglot; I'd expect
>>    the same once we cross the chasm with respect to making CSV support
>>    a built-in detail that elisp developers can take for granted.
>
> You might be right, but if so you're talking about a very different kind
> of "CSV support" than the kind I'm familiar with (which is the support
> to manually edit/browse a human-generated CSV file, as offered by
> `csv-mode`).  You seem to be talking about code to efficiently parse
> a whole CSV file into a Lisp representation (list of lists or better) or
> to generate a CSV-formatted string from such Lisp representation.
>
> Is that right?  In that case, indeed `csv-mode` is of no
> help, basically.
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>
>>> Just an idea/question:
>>>
>>> With the new Lars package vtable may be possible to support CSV or add
>>> a package over it?
>>>
>>> I agree it is a bit annoying to depend of an external package for such
>>> a simple format and maybe the implementation may be simpler than
>>> expected as the format it pretty simple in general.
>>>
>>> WDYT?
>>>
>>> On March 14, 2022 11:30:43 PM GMT+01:00, Stefan Monnier
>>> <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Languages like Python work around this with a csv module that
>>>     comes
>>> bundled; Emacs has a couple of modules out on elpa/melpa all of which
>>> look old.
>>>
>>> Don't know about Melpa, but in (Non)GNU ELPA, I can only find one such
>>> package and it dates back to Dec 2021.
>>>
>>>         Stefan
>

-- 

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
7©4 Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  •0Ü8