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Even with the CLMUL trick, CSV parsing does not play nice. It can be made to work for JSON parsing because you can make more assumptions. With CSV, it only work

Even with the CLMUL trick, CSV parsing does not play nice. It can be made to work for JSON parsing because you can make more assumptions. With CSV, it only works smoothly if you are willing to accept a subset of what most spreadsheet programs accept i.e. to assume your CSV is "well-formed". Considering for example that the following three cells: AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A when opened in Excel will all give you the same value, using CLMUL to normalize will require many repeated additional SIMD operations-- probably at least 8 if not more. At some vector size it will be worth it, but not clear at 256. The irony is, if you are stuck with CSV input, then the fact that you couldn't get a better format/encoding also suggests that you can't assume your CSV is "well-formed"

zwegner 5y ago
Good points all around. Not sure what the OP's requirements are, but judging by their current code, CLMUL should do nicely (or they have a bug). And also, thanks for that example. Clearly I don't know CSV well enough--are quotes in fields that don't start with a quote not special?
- mattewong 5y ago
  If their data comes from a controlled bubble and they need not assume "real-world" data, then CLMUL might do nicely but best case it would likely only be a marginal improvement (and even then I would be willing to bet, not at anything less than 512 bit vector sizes). Best case, it still needs additional vector calls to support quoting. Obviously, if no quoting will be supported, it's even simpler, but then you also cannot support commas or newlines inside of cell values and are getting so far from "CSV" that you might as well just say you have pipe-delimited data which happens to use comma instead of pipe in which case you don't need CLMUL. If quoting needs to be supported, CLMUL will still require a number of repeated passes, shifts etc to deal with the various cases including an escaped first quote char, last quote char, non-first-or-last quote char and embedded commas/newlines.
  - zwegner 5y ago
    Thread's getting a bit old, hope you see this :) Referring to the OP, I'm not sure what exact dialect of csv they're using, but its quoting rules are nothing like Excel's: quotes are escaped with a separate character (possibly backslash), and quoted regions can start anywhere, not just the start of a field. This makes CLMUL much easier to apply, quite similarly to how it's used in simdjson. Finding escaped characters can be done branchlessly with a handful of scalar operations on the masks (this code is in simdjson too). For proper Excel-style parsing, you're quite possibly right (and looking at ZSV, I trust that you've thought about this problem a lot more than me). I'm not certain that it can't all be done efficiently with very few branches, though, using mostly SIMD and some scalar operations on masks. CLMUL might not be useful here, since quotes are treated completely differently depending on whether the field started with a quote. Instead you'd have a first phase basically looking for a comma or newline followed by a quote, then looking for the next unescaped quote. Escaped quotes within quoted fields can be found with a similar sequence to simdjson's backslash support (and removed with something like vcompressb on newer AVX-512 chips).
    - mattewong 5y ago
      Saw it :) > done efficiently with very few branches, though, using mostly SIMD and some scalar operations on masks [...] first phase basically looking for a comma or newline followed by a quote, then looking for the next unescaped quote Yes that's almost exactly what ZSV does, except it just looks for any interesting char (i.e. delim or dbl-quote), irrespective of position relative to other interesting char, and then let's the non-SIMD loop figure out to do with the chunks in between. We tried pretty hard to use CLMUL-- ZSV was designed after a decent-enough digestion of Lemire and Langdale's work to try those techniques-- but the json vs CSV differences were too much, at least for us, to overcome due to the extra 8+ vector calls, without giving up more than the benefit. Furthermore, if you are going to "normalize" the value, even more of that benefit gets lost (in other words, if you read 'aa"aa,"aa""aa"', which are equivalent, and you want to spit out two equivalent values, then you will have to modify the second value before printing non-CSV, or modify the first value to print well-formed CSV, and either way you can't do that more efficiently with vector operations). Since we were not willing to give up the CSV edge cases, we were also not able to find any benefit from CMUL. That's not to say we turned over every stone-- maybe there is a way and we just missed it. > are quotes in fields that don't start with a quote not special? Sorry missed that q before. Yes, that is correct, at least according to how Excel parses with dbl-click-to-open (as opposed to doing an import operation from a menu). They only serve as a delimiter when they are strictly the first char. So: 'first cell, " second cell ,third cell' gives you 3 cells, the second of which starts and ends with a space and has a double-quote as its second char (i.e. the equivalent of '" "" second cell "') As an aside, we made a deliberate decision to be consistent with Excel, for reason other than that in our experience, the users who are least able to cope with edge cases on their own, and therefore rely the most on the software to do what they want/expect-- are also most likely to accept Excel as the "standard", whereas users who want/need a different standard than Excel are also most likely to be able to be able to come up with some solution (e.g. python or other) if their need isn't met by the default behavior of a given software tool.
jart 5y ago
That's not what Python and Google Sheets do. >>> list(csv.reader(['''AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A'''], dialect='excel')) [['AA"A', 'AA"A', 'AA"A']] Has the CSV format been standardized somewhere?
- mattewong 5y ago
  What I can tell you is that if you save a file with 'AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A' (excluding the surrounding single-quotes) and then double-click to open in Excel, you get 3 cells with the exact same values. Furthermore, if you run `echo 'AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A' | xsv select 1,2,3` you again get the same 3 values. For people working with CSV, it's far more likely that the user cares more about consistency with Excel than consistency with some python lib or with Google sheets-- neither of which are used much, compared to Excel, in the worlds where CSV tends to reside (at least in my experience)
- mattewong 5y ago
  Huh? your comment proves exactly what my prior post said, which is that you end up with 3 equal values that were each represented, in the input, in different ways. Looks like csv.reader + dialect=excel is doing exactly that.

zwegner 5y ago

Good points all around. Not sure what the OP's requirements are, but judging by their current code, CLMUL should do nicely (or they have a bug). And also, thanks for that example. Clearly I don't know CSV well enough--are quotes in fields that don't start with a quote not special?

mattewong 5y ago
If their data comes from a controlled bubble and they need not assume "real-world" data, then CLMUL might do nicely but best case it would likely only be a marginal improvement (and even then I would be willing to bet, not at anything less than 512 bit vector sizes). Best case, it still needs additional vector calls to support quoting. Obviously, if no quoting will be supported, it's even simpler, but then you also cannot support commas or newlines inside of cell values and are getting so far from "CSV" that you might as well just say you have pipe-delimited data which happens to use comma instead of pipe in which case you don't need CLMUL. If quoting needs to be supported, CLMUL will still require a number of repeated passes, shifts etc to deal with the various cases including an escaped first quote char, last quote char, non-first-or-last quote char and embedded commas/newlines.
- zwegner 5y ago
  Thread's getting a bit old, hope you see this :) Referring to the OP, I'm not sure what exact dialect of csv they're using, but its quoting rules are nothing like Excel's: quotes are escaped with a separate character (possibly backslash), and quoted regions can start anywhere, not just the start of a field. This makes CLMUL much easier to apply, quite similarly to how it's used in simdjson. Finding escaped characters can be done branchlessly with a handful of scalar operations on the masks (this code is in simdjson too). For proper Excel-style parsing, you're quite possibly right (and looking at ZSV, I trust that you've thought about this problem a lot more than me). I'm not certain that it can't all be done efficiently with very few branches, though, using mostly SIMD and some scalar operations on masks. CLMUL might not be useful here, since quotes are treated completely differently depending on whether the field started with a quote. Instead you'd have a first phase basically looking for a comma or newline followed by a quote, then looking for the next unescaped quote. Escaped quotes within quoted fields can be found with a similar sequence to simdjson's backslash support (and removed with something like vcompressb on newer AVX-512 chips).
  - mattewong 5y ago
    Saw it :) > done efficiently with very few branches, though, using mostly SIMD and some scalar operations on masks [...] first phase basically looking for a comma or newline followed by a quote, then looking for the next unescaped quote Yes that's almost exactly what ZSV does, except it just looks for any interesting char (i.e. delim or dbl-quote), irrespective of position relative to other interesting char, and then let's the non-SIMD loop figure out to do with the chunks in between. We tried pretty hard to use CLMUL-- ZSV was designed after a decent-enough digestion of Lemire and Langdale's work to try those techniques-- but the json vs CSV differences were too much, at least for us, to overcome due to the extra 8+ vector calls, without giving up more than the benefit. Furthermore, if you are going to "normalize" the value, even more of that benefit gets lost (in other words, if you read 'aa"aa,"aa""aa"', which are equivalent, and you want to spit out two equivalent values, then you will have to modify the second value before printing non-CSV, or modify the first value to print well-formed CSV, and either way you can't do that more efficiently with vector operations). Since we were not willing to give up the CSV edge cases, we were also not able to find any benefit from CMUL. That's not to say we turned over every stone-- maybe there is a way and we just missed it. > are quotes in fields that don't start with a quote not special? Sorry missed that q before. Yes, that is correct, at least according to how Excel parses with dbl-click-to-open (as opposed to doing an import operation from a menu). They only serve as a delimiter when they are strictly the first char. So: 'first cell, " second cell ,third cell' gives you 3 cells, the second of which starts and ends with a space and has a double-quote as its second char (i.e. the equivalent of '" "" second cell "') As an aside, we made a deliberate decision to be consistent with Excel, for reason other than that in our experience, the users who are least able to cope with edge cases on their own, and therefore rely the most on the software to do what they want/expect-- are also most likely to accept Excel as the "standard", whereas users who want/need a different standard than Excel are also most likely to be able to be able to come up with some solution (e.g. python or other) if their need isn't met by the default behavior of a given software tool.

jart 5y ago

That's not what Python and Google Sheets do. >>> list(csv.reader(['''AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A'''], dialect='excel')) [['AA"A', 'AA"A', 'AA"A']] Has the CSV format been standardized somewhere?

mattewong 5y ago
What I can tell you is that if you save a file with 'AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A' (excluding the surrounding single-quotes) and then double-click to open in Excel, you get 3 cells with the exact same values. Furthermore, if you run `echo 'AA"A,"AA""A","A"A"A' | xsv select 1,2,3` you again get the same 3 values. For people working with CSV, it's far more likely that the user cares more about consistency with Excel than consistency with some python lib or with Google sheets-- neither of which are used much, compared to Excel, in the worlds where CSV tends to reside (at least in my experience)
mattewong 5y ago
Huh? your comment proves exactly what my prior post said, which is that you end up with 3 equal values that were each represented, in the input, in different ways. Looks like csv.reader + dialect=excel is doing exactly that.