18 lines
1 KiB
Text
18 lines
1 KiB
Text
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This module is for reading and writing a common variation of character
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separated data. The most common example is comma-separated. However
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that is far from the only possibility, the same basic format is
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exported by Microsoft products using tabs, colons, or other
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characters.
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The format is a series of rows separated by returns. Within each row
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you have a series of fields separated by your character
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separator. Fields may either be unquoted, in which case they do not
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contain a double-quote, separator, or return, or they are quoted, in
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which case they may contain anything, and will encode double-quotes by
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pairing them. In Microsoft products, quoted fields are strings and
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unquoted fields can be interpreted as being of various datatypes based
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on a set of heuristics. By and large this fact is irrelevant in Perl
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because Perl is largely untyped. The one exception that this module
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handles that empty unquoted fields are treated as nulls which are
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represented in Perl as undefined values. If you want a zero-length
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string, quote it.
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