Writing to a CSV file

A flat file structure is one of the most elementary database models. Columns can either be fixed length, or use delimiters. The Comma Separated Values (CSV) convention conforms to the idea of delimited flat file structure databases. While it's called CSV, the term CSV is also applied as a broad blanket term for any basic delimited structure consisting of one record per line (for example, tab-separated values).

We could follow a brittle approach for constructing CSV structures, simply by using a multidimensional array and the join method:

var data = [['a','b','c','d','e','f','g'], ['h','i','j','k','l','m','n']];
var csv = data.join("\r\n"); /* renders: a,b,c,d,e,f,g
h,i,j,k,l,m,n */

However, the limitations of this technique quickly become apparent. What if one of our fields contains a comma? Now one field becomes two, thus corrupting our data. Furthermore, we are limited to just using commas as delimiters.

In this recipe we will use the third-party ya-csv module to store...