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

Andrew McNamara andrewm at object-craft.com.au
Mon Jan 10 01:40:06 CET 2005

Andrew explains that in the CSV module, escape characters are not properly removed.

Magnus writes: IMO this is the only reasonable behaviour. I don't understand why the escape character should be left in; this is one of the reason why UNIX-style colon-separated values don't work with the current module. Andrew writes back later: Thinking about this further, I suspect we have to retain the current behaviour, as broken as it is, as the default: it's conceivable that someone somewhere is post-processing the result to remove the backslashes, and if we fix the csv module, we'll break their code. I'm with Magnus on this. No one has 4 year old code using the CSV module. The existing behavior is just simply WRONG. Sure, of course we should try to maintain backward compatibility, but surely SOME cases don't require it, right? Can't we treat this misbehavior as an outright bug? +1 -- the nonremoval of escape characters smells like a bug to me, too.

Okay, I'm glad the community agrees (less work, less crustification).

For what it's worth, it wasn't a bug so much as a misfeature. I was explicitly adding the escape character back in. The intention was to make the feature more forgiving on users who accidently set the escape character - in other words, only special (quoting, escaping, field delimiter) characters received special treatment. With the benefit of hindsight, that was an inadequately considered choice.

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

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