#55: Reading a Comma-Separated File
One common programming task is to transform data from Excel spreadsheets into some useful form, such as HTML or rows in a MySQL table. If we all had to work in Excel (XLS) format, then this would be a real problem. Fortunately, in both Excel and OpenOffice.org, you can export an Excel file into CSV (comma-separated value) format. CSV format is a fancy way to say that it's a text file with one line per data row, with commas between the fields in the row. It looks like this:
"Airport","City","Activity" "LON","London","Museums" "PAR","Paris","Dining" "SLC","Salt Lake City","Skiing"
Although you may think that this is just a matter of grabbing lines and splitting them using a comma as a delimiter, you have to worry ...
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