I need to process a CSV file from FedEx.com containing shipping history. Unfortunately FedEx doesn’t seem to actually test its CSV files as it doesn’t quote strings that have commas in them.
For instance, a company name might be “Dog Widgets, Inc.” but the CSV doesn’t quote that string, so any CSV parser thinks that comma before “Inc.” is the start of a new field.
Is there any way I can reliably parse those rows using Ruby?
The only differentiating characteristic that I can find is that the commas that are part of a string have a space after then. Commas that separate fields have no spaces. No clue how that helps me parse this, but it is something I noticed.
Well, here’s an idea: You could replace each instance of comma-followed-by-a-space with a unique character, then parse the CSV as usual, then go through the resulting rows and reverse the replace.