Getting CSV into an array

Getting Started
1

Given a string array of; Birds()

And a string of:

myString= “owl, robin, cardinal, hawk, chickadee”

What is the most elegant way to populate the array with the birds in the csv string?

2 
birds = Split( myString, ", " )

But I’d be surprised if there really is a space after the commas. At any rate, Split is what you’re looking for.

3

Just to be complete, conversely,

myString = Join( birds, ", " )
4

You may want to cover quotes in the CSV.
For that I put a day of work long ago into a function SplitCommaSeparatedValuesMBS which does that including a lot of edge cases. (part of MBS Util plugin)

5

I have something similar in my M_String module, SplitQuoted_MTC.

You can get that module here.

6

well since we’re all piling on you can have the code I wrote years ago for parsing csv files (and whatever else you find there)

http://www.great-white-software.com/REALbasic_Code.html