[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #60138] [octave forge] (dataframe) `dataframe` incorrectly parses csv entries containing commas inside quotes

[Pascal Dupuis]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #60138 (project octave):

Hello Tasos,
I'm glad you appreciate my efforts.
 
About the release ... that's another issue. A few years ago, Carne Draug would
have helped with some of the intricacies about releasing a new version. But he
resigned, and there is no more benevolent manager (that I know ) of
https://octave.sourceforge.io. Look at the copyright: 2018. Latest news: 26
Aug 2018.

I had a look in the IO package. Basically, the parsing is done in C, which is
much faster. Their code is about flipping some indicator when it detects a
quote, so separators which are inside quote are kept into the string. It's
better than mine, which is written in Octave, but it can't detect malformed
strings. There is a discussion on
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18144431/regex-to-split-a-csv
about regexes to analyse a CSV string.  The subject is complex.

About R: data frames are a kind of matrix, where each column may have its own
subtype, and with meta-information. Plus you have the magic of OOP to use them
as first-class citizens: you ask for a matrix operation ? You get it. You ask
for a list view ? You get it. You want to select by column name ? What about
"myfit = lm(Y~X, data=mycsv)" ?  It's much more that syntactic sugar, it's
about elegance. You focus on the relationship between two variables from a
dataset, without caring for their positon.  They can be factored too.
Sophisticated regressions relies on dummy variables; and R operations like
'lm' do that the right way.

Those were the objectives I wanted to reach when I started to write the data
frame package. But 10 years later, I still do not have the basic
implementation running as it should.

Regards

Pascal
 

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