Can I use Text::CSV_XS to parse a csv-format string without writing it to disk?

Question

I am getting a "csv file" from a vendor (using their API), but what they do is just spew the whole thing into their response. It wouldn't be a significant problem except that, of course, some of those pesky humans entered the data and put in "features" like line breaks. What I am doing now is creating a file for the raw data and then reopening it to read the data:

open RAW, ">", "$rawfile" or die "ERROR: Could not open $rawfile for write: $! \n";
print RAW $response->content;
close RAW;

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({ binary=>1,always_quote=>1,eol=>$/ });
open my $fh, "<", "$rawfile" or die "ERROR: Could not open $rawfile for read: $! \n";

while ( $line = $csv->getline ($fh) ) { ...

Somehow this seems ... inelegant. It seems that I ought to be able to just read the data from the $response->content (multiline string) as if it were a file. But I'm drawing a total blank on how do this. A pointer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Paul

Answer 1

You could use a string filehandle:

my $data = $response->content;
open my $fh, "<", \$data or croak "unable to open string filehandle : $!";
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({ binary=>1,always_quote=>1,eol=>$/ });
while ( $line = $csv->getline ($fh) ) { ... }

Answer 2

Yes, you can use Text::CSV_XS on a string, via its functional interface

use warnings;
use strict;
use feature 'say';

use Text::CSV_XS qw(csv);  # must use _XS version

my $csv = qq(a,line\nand,another);

my $aoa = csv(in => \$csv) 
    or die Text::CSV->error_diag; 

say "@$_" for @aoa;    

Note that this indeed needs Text::CSV_XS (normally Text::CSV works but not with this).

I don't know why this isn't available in the OO interface (or perhaps is but is not documented).

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While the above parses the string directly as asked, one can also lessen the "inelegant" aspect in your example by writing content directly to a file as it's acquired, what most libraries support like with :content_file option in LWP::UserAgent::get method.

Let me also note that most of the time you want the library to decode content, so for LWP::UA to use decoded_content (see HTTP::Response).