Parsing a CSV file using gawk

Question

How do you parse a CSV file using gawk? Simply setting FS=\",\" is not enough, as a quoted field with a comma inside will be treated as multiple fields.

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Answer 1

Perl has the Text::CSV_XS module which is purpose-built to handle the quoted-comma weirdness.
Alternately try the Text::CSV module.

perl -MText::CSV_XS -ne 'BEGIN{$csv=Text::CSV_XS->new()} if($csv->parse($_)){@f=$csv->fields();for $n (0..$#f) {print "field #$n: $f[$n]\n"};print "---\n"}' file.csv

Produces this output:

field #0: one
field #1: two
field #2: three, four
field #3: five
---
field #0: six, seven
field #1: eight
field #2: nine
---

Here's a human-readable version.
Save it as parsecsv, chmod +x, and run it as "parsecsv file.csv"

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Text::CSV_XS;
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new();
open(my $data, '<', $ARGV[0]) or die "Could not open '$ARGV[0]' $!\n";
while (my $line = <$data>) {
    if ($csv->parse($line)) {
        my @f = $csv->fields();
        for my $n (0..$#f) {
            print "field #$n: $f[$n]\n";
        }
        print "---\n";
    }
}

You may need to point to a different version of perl on your machine, since the Text::CSV_XS module may not be installed on your default version of perl.

Can't locate Text/CSV_XS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home/gnu/lib/perl5/5.6.1/i686-linux /home/gnu/lib/perl5/5.6.1 /home/gnu/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i686-linux /home/gnu/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1 /home/gnu/lib/perl5/site_perl .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

If none of your versions of Perl have Text::CSV_XS installed, you'll need to:
sudo apt-get install cpanminus
sudo cpanm Text::CSV_XS