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The CsvTableBuilder
handler can read data in the semi-standard CSV format.
The intention is that it understands the version of that format
spoken by MS Excel amongst others,
though the documentation on which it is based
was not obtained directly from Microsoft.
The rules for data which it understands are as follows:
- Each row must have the same number of comma-separated fields.
- Whitespace (space or tab) adjacent to a comma is ignored.
- Adjacent commas, or a comma at the start or end of a line
(whitespace apart) indicates a null field.
- Lines are terminated by any sequence of carriage-return or newline
characters ('\r' or '\n')
(a corollary of this is that blank lines are ignored).
- Cells may be enclosed in double quotes; quoted values may contain
linebreaks (or any other character); a double quote character within
a quoted value is represented by two adjacent double quotes.
- The first line may be a header line containing column names
rather than a row of data. Exactly the same syntactic rules are
followed for such a row as for data rows.
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STIL - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library
Starlink User Note252
STIL web page:
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/
Author email:
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk