Re: Any way to set "--csv" in BEGIN?

[Ed Morton]

Thanks for the quick response Andy.

It's not a huge deal for me personally as I don't expect to ever NEED 
that functionality, e.g. I'd normally write a shell script to call any 
non-trivial awk script so I can always add `--csv` when appropriate from 
shell, and if I wanted to switch to CSV mode mid-processing to do 
anything like parse a field that contains CSV then FPAT/patsplit(), or 
FS/split() if the opposite, are almost certainly good enough. And I 
could always pipe+getline to a new script in a subshell if absolutely 
necessary.

It just seemed like something there would be a way to do (I had tried 
and failed setting PROCINFO["CSV"]=1) but I couldn't figure out how so 
thanks for confirming there isn't!

    Ed.

On 11/10/2023 8:47 AM, Andrew J. Schorr wrote:
> Hi Ed,
>
> I don't see any way to do that currently. The choice of CSV parsing impacts the
> guts of the record parsing code (because newline characters could be inside a
> quoted CSV field), and I don't know whether it would be feasible to change this
> on the fly. But I can see how it might be desirable to manipulate this from
> BEGIN or based on which file is being parsed. Currently, when invoked with
> --csv, gawk sets PROCINFO["CSV"] to 1. One could imagine having a hook in the
> PROCINFO array such that if user code manipulates that value, it would change
> the parsing mode (by pointing PROCINFO_node->array_funcs to special array
> methods that check or updates to "CSV", similarly to how ENVIRON_node is
> configured to use the env_array_func methods to impact the environment). I
> don't know how easy it would be to get this to work properly though.
> If somebody changed this mid-stream, it might hork things.
>
> Regards,
> Andy
>
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 08:16:18AM -0600, Ed Morton wrote:
> > I'm loving the new "--csv" option for CSV parsing in gawk 5.3,
> > thanks, but I don't see anything in the documentation about
> > specifying the input is CSV from inside an awk script so, in case
> > I'm just not seeing it - is there any variable we can set or any
> > other way to specify the equivalent of "--csv" from inside an awk
> > script, e.g. in a BEGIN section, like we can set RS, FS, FPAT,
> > and/or FIELDWIDTHS for the existing types of input parsing?
> >
> >      Ed.