On Apr 17, 2007, at 9:31 PM, Stephen Smith wrote:

> @James, Right on. I think you're correct - FasterCSV should handle  
> the CSV
> reading no problem. I think my first edition might handle writing  
> to a flat
> file based on an XML schema. I'm going to try to think about  
> generalization
> from the beginning, and see if that keeps my code easier to  
> maintain and
> use. When you wrote FasterCSV, how did you bake in the formatting  
> rules? Did
> you write an XML schema or something similar based on the CSV RFC?

FasterCSV was born from a discussion on Ruby Core about how we might  
speed up the CSV library.  I provided some information out of the  
book Mastering Regular Expression, which claimed to have a single  
expression for parsing the format.

Some edge case that the expression didn't handle where raised, I  
fixed those, and that's pretty much FasterCSV's parser to this day.   
It's not too glamorous I guess, but I like how it shows what we can  
do when we work together.

James Edward Gray II