Anyone who claims that CSVs are easy to parse have obviously never had to deal with the kind of junk that you see in real CSV files. Quite apart from quotes (is

Anyone who claims that CSVs are easy to parse have obviously never had to deal with the kind of junk that you see in real CSV files. Quite apart from quotes (is a "a,b" two fields with '"a' and 'b"' or a single field with three characters?) there are also things like new lines like like,"this newline" Which are part of the field and not two records. Or having to deal with user names like Blue, Al (outlook's preferred format for representing people's names). Or you end up with O'Reilly - is the ' part of a quoted string or not? And of course a comma isn't necessarily the only separator - what about tabs? Or a document where an intermediary has saved it in an editor that has "helpfully" converted tabs to N spaces (where N is a universally disagreed upon nonzero positive integer)