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Asked: 2026-05-17T16:31:27+00:00

I need to load in a large CSV file (>1MB) and parse it. Generally

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I need to load in a large CSV file (>1MB) and parse it.
Generally this is quite easy to do by splitting first on linebreaks and then commas.
The problem is though that some entries contain Strings that include their own commas. When this spreadsheet is converted to CSV, the lines containing commas are wrapped in quotes.

I’ve written a parser that first escapes all the commas in these strings, then splits it on linebreaks and then commas, and then unescapes the values again.

This is quite a slow process for such a long string, as I need to iterate through the whole string.
Does anyone know a faster or more optimised method of dealing with this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Have you had a look at csvlib yet? It is a parser library for ActionScript 3. It claims to be designed to properly handle quoted strings.

    Hopefully, you are already enclosing your strings in quotes, especially the ones containing the commas. CSV parsers cannot distinguish a comma that is part of a string from a comma that separates two strings, unless the strings have quotes around them.

        
Good
    "This string, has a comma", "This string doesn't"

Bad
    This string, has a comma, this string doesn't
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