Arnold Robbins created FPAT to parse CSV, but it doesn't really do that very well. I agree that it would have been better to just hardcode a CSV mode. CSV is co

Arnold Robbins created FPAT to parse CSV, but it doesn't really do that very well. I agree that it would have been better to just hardcode a CSV mode. CSV is common, so you shouldn't have to think hard in order to parse it, and FPAT is hard. PHP makes parsing CSV a breeze. You could write a good CSV parser in gawk and @include it in other scripts as a solution short of hacking gawk itself. But it's generally easier just to find some other way, such as swapping CSV for TSV -- which works better in awk. Hierarchical formats like JSON are a little different, because they don't fit the awk model very well. You could add functions to work with JSON, but working with it this way wouldn't be very awk-like. You're better off preprocessing the JSON into records with another tool to make it more awk-friendly, or simply using another language altogether.