On 18 January 2017 at 04:10, Juergen Sauermann < juergen.sauerm...@t-online.de> wrote:
> What I do not like about *⎕CSV* (actually I am only guessing here because > I dont know what it reallly does, > but I assume it is specifically for comma separated lists) is that it is > supposedly only works for comma > separated lists. If we have something more general which solves the > performance problem of > *Z*⍪ without only working for specific formats like CSV then I would > prefer that. > You make a good point, and in my envisioned function (being an external function, or a built-in one (called ⎕CSV or otherwise)) would accept a left-hand argument, being a format definition telling the function how to parse the CSV data. You are absolutely correct in that there are many ways to express CSV data, and looking at the flags available in R <https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-data.html#Spreadsheet_002dlike-data> gives some insight into this. My intention is to build something that can at least handle the most important of these variations. What the left-hand format definition will look like, I have not yet decided, except for one thing: I want to be able to specify a function that will be called that can be responsible for parsing a line. This way it'll be possible to handle any format that is not natively supported. Regards, Elias
