Writing to a CSV file
A flat file structure is one of the most elementary database models. The columns can either be of a fixed length or used with 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 to any basic delimited structure that consists of one record per line (for example, tab-separated values).
We can follow a brittle approach to construct CSV structures simply by using a multidimensional array and the join
method, as follows:
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...