[DCSV-4] \return as record separator with unquoted fields is read as part of the field

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:00:49 -0500

This regards the gray area of being "more forgiving." If I understand RFC 4180 correctly, I want to suggest substituting one bit of forgiveness for another: rather than supporting unquoted, multi-line cell values, I suggest supporting CSVs with just \return as the record-separator. Would you accept a patch for that?

A file with \return as record-separator is interpreted by read-csv as a single row like (["Header1" "Header2\rval1" "val2"]). I believe the RFC only allows fields to contain CR and LF when they're escaped (i.e., surrounded in double quotes). See the ABNF at the end of section 2.

As far as implementation, I believe this would require wrapping any Reader w/o markSupported in one that does, so that the LF following a CR can be consumed when present.

[I've classified this as a major defect because I ran into a \return-delimited file as soon as I passed a CSV from a Linux machine to a Windows machine, so I'm guessing these files are common. Feel free to reclassify.]

Clojure JIRA

[DCSV-4] \return as record separator with unquoted fields is read as part of the field