CSV and fields with spaces

Question

I am using Text::CSV_XS to create CSV files. I see that if a field has a space then it is outputted within double quotes e.g.

john,smith,"Some address",,,,bla  

I was wondering are the double quotes mandatory in the example? Or is it some configuration option?

Answer 1

As Subbeh has already suggested, you can set quote_char to undef when calling new, to suppress this, as per https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::CSV_XS#new

I'd question whether you should, though. In the CSV specification, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180, these quotes are always permitted and sometimes necessary (although strictly only when the field contains a separator character or a quote character itself). Since it's perfectly valid for them to be there, and any CSV-parsing tool you pass the data to later will cope ... I'd be inclined to let Text::CSV do its thing.

In particular, if you set quote_char to undef as suggested, fields which contain sep_char (comma, usually) will lead to breakage.

Edit: You can set quote_space to a false value in your call to new to prevent this specific behaviour (of quoting fields with spaces in), which the CSV spec neither mandates nor prohibits.