csv file reading

I have a Rebol utility that will read a csv file and open tickets with the info. Works like a champ. Or should I say "worked". The last field is a comment field. In the recent csv, the comment was actually a e-mail that had been put in the field. Rebol normally reads line till the newline. Well the e-mail has a bunch of newlines in it so if I look at the file on NotePad, it sees all of them and shows new lines. This is causing Rebol to think each line of the mail should be used to open a ticket which is not going to work. Has anyone come up with a way to deal with multiline fields in a csv? For example, You have 5 fields. Customer,server,contact,phone,comment The data is Bill,Bilbo,bill-yahoo.com,555-555-5555, Please open a ticket for this server That is correct. But if they put say 5 lines of text in the comment field, how do we deal with that? I'm currently using [,"] for delimiters because excel will auto put in the " if it needs to. Ideas? I'm searching the archives for info. Thanks John

Hi John, /first/, despite not knowing the origin and format restrictions of the emails you have to deal with, I suspect that commas probably aren't the perfect choice to delimit the data fields. Just think of an email including a comma, be it one single line or not, wouldn't that be interpreted as two fields, anyway? /Second/, regarding multi-line emails, maybe { and } can be used: {Customer} {server} {contact} {phone} {this is a longer comment with some line-breaks.} But, depending on the software it isn't too likely that you can have different opening and closing separators as in { and }, so some other approach may be needed. For starters, so, have a look at the following IMPORT-TICKETS function: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ import-tickets: func [ {Imports tickets from raw data string. Returns a block containing a bolean value indicating whether all raw data has been parsed successfully and a block of the tickets imported (may be empty and gets cleared with every function call).} raw [string!] "Raw string data to be imported" /with "Delimiters to be used" field-delimiter [char!] "delimiter between fields (defaults to %)" ticket-delimiter [char!] "delimiter between fields (defaults to %, too)" /local tickets ] [ field-delimiter: any [field-delimiter #"%"] ticket-delimiter: any [ticket-delimiter #"%"] clear tickets: [] reduce [ parse/all raw [ some [ copy name to field-delimiter 1 skip copy first-name to field-delimiter 1 skip copy email to field-delimiter 1 skip copy phone to field-delimiter 1 skip [ copy comment to ticket-delimiter 1 skip | copy comment to end ] (insert/only tail tickets new-line/all reduce [trim name trim first-name trim email trim phone trim comment] on) ] ] new-line/all tickets on ] ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ USAGE: IMPORT-TICKETS raw /with field-delimiter ticket-delimiter DESCRIPTION: Imports tickets from raw data string. Returns a block containing a bolean value indicating whether all raw data has been parsed successfully and a block of the tickets imported (may be empty and gets cleared with every function call). IMPORT-TICKETS is a function value. ARGUMENTS: raw -- Raw string data to be imported (Type: string) REFINEMENTS: /with -- Delimiters to be used field-delimiter -- delimiter between fields (defaults to %) (Type: char) ticket-delimiter -- delimiter between fields (defaults to %, too) (Type: char) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ probe import-tickets {Bill%Bilbo%bill-yahoo.com%555-555-5555%Please open a ticket for this server in line 4% Bill%Bilbo%bill-yahoo.com%555-555-5555%Please open the ticket now!% Random%Joe%joe-random.com%123-456-7890%Yet another multi-line comment} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [true [ [ "Bill" "Bilbo" "bill-yahoo.com" "555-555-5555" {Please open a ticket for this server in line 4} ] [ "Bill" "Bilbo" "bill-yahoo.com" "555-555-5555" "Please open the ticket now!" ] [ "Random" "Joe" "joe-random.com" "123-456-7890" "Yet another^/multi-line^/comment" ] ]] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HTH, Christian John Blake schrieb: