applescript to parse csv

Explain what exactly it is you want to do with your csv file and what the output should be. Ideally post one row from it. awk makes it easy to work with csv files btw.

 

Does it have to be an applescript? sed + awk + bash are great for these tasks. Perl is good too. Also, WTH do you want to accomplish?

 

Yes, but what do you want to do with these fields? Are you interested in all rows but only specific columns, which? What output format? CSV?

 

A quick Google search of "applescript explode" should do the trick. I took a glance at some of the results and found this one to be pretty good: http://applescript.bratis-lover.net/library/string/#explode

"Explode" or "split" are common text parsing verbs (and functions/methods in programming languages) used for what you are wanting to do. Pick your delimiter (in your case ",") and a line from your file. It will create an array, with each index containing the value from each "column". Do what you will with the array. Then, move on to the next line. Repeat until EOF.

Be careful, though. You say you are using contact information. You might find a comma inside one of your "columns" and I'm not sure how AppleScript will handle it. A lot of times a .csv will wrap text in double-quotes, so that may help.

Good luck!

 

You need to define your input and your expected output. Otherwise all we can do is vaguely direct you to resources we think you might need.