[Python-Dev] Minor change to behaviour of csv module (original) (raw)

Andrew McNamara andrewm at object-craft.com.au
Fri Jan 7 08:54:54 CET 2005

I'm considering a change to the csv module that could potentially break some obscure uses of the module (but CSV files usually quote, rather than escape, so the most common uses aren't effected).

Currently, with a non-default escapechar='\', input like:

field one,field \
two,field three

Returns:

["field one", "field \\\ntwo", "field three"]

In the 2.5 series, I propose changing this to return:

["field one", "field \ntwo", "field three"]

Is this reasonable? Is the old behaviour desirable in any way (we could add a switch to enable to new behaviour, but I feel that would only allow the confusion to continue)?

BTW, some of my other changes have changed the exceptions raised when bad arguments were passed to the reader and writer factory functions - previously, the exceptions were semi-random, including TypeError, AttributeError and csv.Error - they should now almost always be TypeError (like most other argument passing errors). I can't see this being a problem, but I'm prepared to listen to arguments.

-- Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft http://www.object-craft.com.au/

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