xml or csv? when it comes to importing data...

FWIW, here's some code from stdlib.js for parsing lines in a CSV file. This correctly handles quoted fields (with embedded commas) and just about everything else that I've been able to throw at it. Some of the code (the 'while (true)' loop, in particular) is there because I couldn't get the master RegExp expression quite right and had to handle some cases manually.

  var rexStr = '([^",]+)|"((?:[^"]|"")*)"|^,';
  var rexp = new RegExp(rexStr);
  function parseCSVLine(line) {
    var ch = ',';
    var parts = [];
    var res;
    while (line.length && (res = line.match(rexp)) != null) {
      if (res[1] || res[2]) {
        if (res[1]) {
          parts.push(res[1]);
        } else {
          parts.push(res[2].replace(/""/g, '"'));
        }
        line = line.slice(res[0].length + res.index);
        if (line[0] == ch) {
          line = line.slice(1);
        }
      } else {
        while (true) {
          if (line[0] == ch) {
            parts.push('');
            line = line.slice(1);
            continue;
          }
          if (line.startsWith('""')) {
            parts.push('');
            line = line.slice(2);
            if (line[0] == ch) {
              line = line.slice(1);
            }
            continue;
          }
          break;
        }
      }
    }
    return parts;
  }