csvinfo VS csvquote

A long while ago I wrote up a little processor to determine field lengths in a given file - I forgot the original reason. ( https://github.com/sullivant/csvinfo )

However, I feel I really should have taken the time to learn Awk better as it could probably be done there, and simply! (It was a good excuse to tinker with rust, but that's an aside.)

There is a small program I wrote called csvquote[1] that can be used to sanitize input to awk so it can rely on delimiter characters (commas) to always mean delimiters. The results from awk then get piped through the same program at the end to restore the commas inside the field values.

Also works for other text processing tools like cut, sed, sort, etc.

[1] https://github.com/dbro/csvquote

CSVs with quoted fields and imbedded newlines can be troublesome in awk. Years ago I had found a script that worked for me, I'm not sure but I think it was this:

http://lorance.freeshell.org/csv/

There's also https://github.com/dbro/csvquote which is more unix-like in philosophy: it only handles transforming the CVS data into something that awk (or other utilities) can more easily deal with. I haven't used it but will probably try it next time I need something like that.