Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about Huge CSV and XML Files in Python, here is a quick summary:

Quick walkthrough of my code for converting a very large CSV file into a very large XML file using the Python standard libraries. Despite a few issues along the way, was a very pleasant experience.

You are responding to this comment written by Will Larson on January 22nd 2009, 17:47.

So.. how are you handling the non-deterministic parsing? If you have a list of headers in the first row, then you can identify the number of expected elements per row. So you know any row with more than N unescaped commas is malformed. What then?

1. Just say to hell with it, and after reaching N-1 columns, force everything else into the last column.
2. Do the same, but starting at the end. (Why would this be better? I don't think it would be. But I want it to be.)
3. Start from front and back. Take the first (N/2)-1 columns from the front, and the first N/2 columns from the rear, and then make everything inbetween into one column.
4. ?????

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