>Can't they? If my experience reflects a relevant sample then the answer is that most can but a very significant minority fails at the job (under the given wor

>Can't they? If my experience reflects a relevant sample then the answer is that most can but a very significant minority fails at the job (under the given working conditions). Whether or not _you_ can is a separate question. I don't see anything wrong with your code. It does of course assume that whatever is contained in rows is correct. It also assumes that the result is correctly written to a file without making any encoding mistakes or forgetting to flush the stream. Not using name value pairs makes CSV more prone to mistakes such as incorrect ordering or number of values in some rows, a header row that doesn't correspond with the data rows, etc. Some export files are merged from multiple sources or go through many iterations over many years, which makes such mistakes far more likely. I have also seen files that end abruptly somewhere in the middle. This isn't specific to CSV but it is specific to not using libraries and not using libraries appears to be more prevalent when people generate CSV. You'd be surprised how many CSV files are out there where the developer tried to guess incorrectly whether or not a column would ever have to be escaped. Maybe they were right initially and it didn't have to be escaped but then years later something causes a change in number formats (internationalisation) and bang, silent data corruption. Prioritising correctness and robustness over efficiency as you have done is the best choice in most situations. Using a well tested library is another option to get the same result.