bug-recutils
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[bug-recutils] Confusing error message


From: John Darrington
Subject: [bug-recutils] Confusing error message
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 14:18:01 +0000
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

I fed this input :

one,two,three
x,y,z
a,b,c,d
xx,yy,zz

into csv2rec

This (correctly) produced an error.  But the error message is very terse and 
IMO very confusing.

$ ./utils/csv2rec foo.csv
csv2rec: error: not enough headers$

1.  There is no newline after the message, so the prompt appears directly after 
the message, which is ugly.
    Some shells (eg: zsh) don't even produce a prompt until it sees a newline, 
so this will appear under zsh
    to have hung.

2.  'not enough headers' might actually be wrong.  More likely it's a case of 
'too many non-header fields'.

3.  The line number of the offending record is not given.  So it would be 
difficult to track down the 
    problem if the input was large.

I suggest a much more verbose and descriptive error, such as 

csv2rec: file %s line %d: %d header fields were read, but this line contains %d 
fields.

J'

-- 
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://keys.gnupg.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]