option to ignore whitespace stripping within quotes

[li1]

Hey @quinnj,

I'm rewriting our data loading at the moment, migrating to Parsers.jl.

My request is more or less the opposite of #106: For CSV parsing, it would be great to provide an option that allows us strip whitespaces around unquoted fields, but leave it within quotes.

For example, a CSV

A, B   ,  C,D     
      "hello", "good day"     ,      "   same same     "   ,   whatever         

should Ideally parse into ["A", "B", "C", "D"] for the first line and

["hello", "good day", "   same same     ", "whatever"]`

for the second.

Would it be straightforward to add that as an option?

[quinnj]

Sorry for the slow response here. @nickrobinson251, as I consider this, it seems to me that it's actually incorrect in our original stripwhitespace implementation to strip whitespace within quoted strings. Like, the point of quoting a string is you want to preserve what's inside, including whitespace.

I think I perhaps just got too over-eager in that first implementation and didn't realize that we're over-stripping. Does that make sense? Do we think there would still be a use-case for stripping the whitespace inside quotes? I guess there are sometimes cases where a csv writer just quotes everything and you might want to also be able to strip inside quotes, but that feels like an additional option we'd want to be opt-in, since you're electing to ignore stuff inside your quotes.

[nickrobinson251]

Do we think there would still be a use-case for stripping the whitespace inside quotes? I guess there are sometimes cases where a csv writer just quotes everything and you might want to also be able to strip inside quotes, but that feels like an additional option we'd want to be opt-in, since you're electing to ignore stuff inside your quotes.

Yeah, unfortunately i have this use-case, so it does exist 😞

I agree stripping whitespace within quotes should be opt-in and not the default for what stripwhitespace does (unlike currently)

[quinnj]

Alright, PR is up (#112) to fix stripwhitespace to preserve whitespace inside quoted string, but also adds stripquoted to allow stripping inside quotes.