Wes Gamble wrote:

/ ...

> I need some advice.  My questions are:
> 
> 1) Is there a way to get FasterCSV to accept input like the above?  How
> can I set up a custom parsing scheme?
> 2) Should I modify the FasterCSV parser directly to accept this sort of
> input?
> 3) Should I pre-process the file to eliminate/modify these sorts of
> cases to improve the likelihood of a successful FasterCSV parse?

I strongly recommend that you normalize the database to conform to CSV
conventions, before performing any processing. This is much to be preferred
to rewriting a standard library in such a way that it accepts the malformed
data.

The original database doesn't meet normal CSV conventions. If it is expected
to exist for any length of time in its present form, you may find yourself
rewriting a lot of parsers to get them to accept it, or you can fix the
database itself, once. I think the latter approach makes more sense.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com