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Comment by nullwagon | Hacker News Reader

awk -F","

Problem solved.

Not when the data is like this.

  "Richard, Martin", "23 NS, North Coast, NY"

Comma frequently occurs inside texts, and then awk fails.

awk -F'", "'

That's apostrophe, quote, comma, space, end quote, apostrophe.

Which still fails if the values contain escaped quotes:

    Name, Age, Address
    "James aka ""Jim"", ""licensed"" attorney", 42, "New York"

That's three values:

    James aka "Jim", "licensed" attorney
    42
    New York

And there are other possible irregularities: zero or N spaces after the comma separators; unquoted values when they're not needed; backslash-escaped special characters; escaping newlines.

What if not all columns are quoted? A lot of the time only the columns that need quoting are quoted and the others are bare.

Nice solution.

Will not work were numeric fields are not quoted.

But nice solution, nevertheless.

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