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

[Andrew J. Schorr]

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.