Small inconsistency or, at least, ambigious.
KES777 opened this issue · comments
I have a question on SO and people advice to use your module.
Module's synopsis has:
my $aoa = csv (in => "data.csv" ); # as array of array
my $aoh = csv (in => "data.csv", headers => "auto"); # as array of hash
# Write array of arrays as csv file
csv (in => $aoa, out => "file.csv", sep_char=> ";");
If I do not provide out the result and call is made in scalar context the $aoa or $aoh will be returned.
if I provide out the result will be saved there.
So call result and out is two different things. First is the data how it was read from csv file into memory, and out is our csv formatted data.
Why when I do $data = csv( in => $aoa, out => 'file.csv', headers => 'auto' ) I get in my $data csv formatted data instead of $aoh? nowhere in the doc I did not find that $data should return csv formatted array.
The doc clearly says
.... It returns an array- or hash-reference on parsing (or
"undef" on fail) or **the numeric value of "error_diag" on writing.**
https://github.com/makamaka/Text-CSV/blob/master/lib/Text/CSV.pm#L1669-L1671
If I provide data for the in. is it always parsed?
If you provide out, then in should be a reference to an array or a hash (or a code reference that produces a reference to an array or a hash). If you only have a CSV string, then you need to parse it first (maybe with another csv function).
Even if I do csv call without out parameter
my $data = [
[ 'id', 'name', 'value' ],
[ 23, 'foo', 77 ],
[ 44, 'bar', 'dfd' ],
]
$data = csv( in => $aoa, headers => 'auto' );
$data has csv formatted data, but I expect it has aoa because I did call in scalar context. I expect csv only at out
Read the manual carefully.
in
Used to specify the source. "in" can be a file name (e.g. "file.csv"),
which will be opened for reading and closed when finished, a file handle
(e.g. $fh or "FH"), a reference to a glob (e.g. "\*ARGV"), the glob
itself (e.g. *STDIN), or a reference to a scalar (e.g. "\q{1,2,"csv"}").
In the case above, in => $aoa is not correct, and predefined $data is meaningless because csv( in => ... ) without out (nor headers) returns aoa, that means an array (reference) of array (references), like your predefined $data.
If you don't understand how to use csv function, try Object interface ( my $csv = Text::CSV->new; $csv->read ... etc), which should be much more straightforward for you.