Stefan Monnier 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 >>> 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) ♈ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1 🦮