Posted on August 15, 2018 by John Ky

In last week’s post I described how to exploit data-parallelism to build a rank-select bit-string for a cut compatible delimeter-separated-values format, parsing 8-bytes at-a-time.

In this post we will look at how to do the same for the CSV format described in RFC4180, where complicating factors such as quotes, escaping, and quoted control characters cannot be ignored.

The RFC format

The data-parallel parser will need to deal with the following cases where carriage-return characters are represented by ␍ and line-feed characters are represented by ␊:

When no quotations are used:

aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊ zzz,yyy,xxx

When quotations are used only around the entire fields containing no newline characters:

"aaa","bbb","ccc"␍␊zzz,yyy,xxx

When quotations are used only around the entire fields which may contain newline or delimiter characters:

"aaa","b␍␊ b,b","ccc"␍␊ zzz,yyy,xxx

When quotations are used within quoted fields represented by two consecutive double-quotes:

"aaa","b""bb","ccc"

The Parser Specification

Because we are using rank-select bit-strings to index into the original text of the document and to minimise work, the parser is not expected to do additional processing to remove surrounding double quotes, escape quotes nor remove control characters.

These are instead left to a higher level parser built on top of our parser.

This means any strings the parser will yield will be a strict substring of the original document.

The parser will parse the earlier examples to produce results as described below.

When no quotations are used the substring representing the field text is returned in the result.

The line-feed byte will act as our newline character. Control chracters other than the row-delimiting line-feed byte are also included in the result with their closest field as is:

When quotations are used only around the entire fields containing no newline characters, the field is returned exactly as they appear in the original document including the surrounding double-quotes:

When quotations are used only around the entire fields containing line-feed characters or delimiters, such characters will be returned as part of their field in the result:

When quotations are used within quoted fields represented by two consecutive double-quotes, the consecutive double-quotes will be returned in the results as is:

Returning substrings of the raw text as is in this way is good for performance because it means that in situtations where user-code only wishes to access some fields of each row in the document, they do not need to incur the costs of properly parsing the fields they don’t need.

This is also beneficial for cases where the user wishes to byte-copy fields from the input document into an output document, for example running a program to select desired fields from a CSV document into a new CSV document.

Deriving the strategy

In order to demonstrate the strategy, I will combine all the possible cases into a single document:

aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc"

We will build the rank-select bit-strings for newlines and delimiters exactly as we did for the non-conformant parser in the last post:

text: aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc" markers: 00010001000010000000100010001001000 newlines: 00000000000010000000000010000000000

Unfortunately, these rank-select bit-strings, are incorrect because they do not properly handle the case where line-feed or delimiter characters are embedded in a quoted field.

I’ve marked the incorrectly set bits with an asterisk * :

text: aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc" markers: 000100010000000000001000*000100*000 newlines: 000000000000000000000000*0000000000

We will need to somehow clear the * bits in our rank-select bit-strings.

Since we desire to use a data-parallel approach to parsing CSV, we can start by building a rank-select bit-string for the double-quotes in our CSV document, just as we did for delimeters a new newlines.

text: aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc" markers: 000100010000000000001000*000100*000 newlines: 000000000000000000000000*0000000000 quotes: 00000000000001011001010000010100001

But this doesn’t actually help me.

I want to clear all the bits marked by * without clearing the the other bits.

I can’t use quotes as a mask because everywhere there is a 1 bit regardless of whether it is correct (ie. 1 ) or incorrect (ie. * ), the corresponding bit in quotes is zero.

Furthermore I don’t actually care about the 1 bits in quotes because there can never be a delimiter or newline at a position that is already occupied by a quote " .

Instead I need something like mask below, which has a 1 bit everywhere that is unquoted and a 0 bit everywhere that is quoted:

text: aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc" markers: 000100010000000000001000*000100*000 newlines: 000000000000000000000000*0000000000 quotes: 00000000000001011001010000010100001 mask: 1111111111111?0??00?1?00000?1?0000?

I’ve also marked the locations that correspond to a double-quote as ? because I don’t care about the bits at these locations because they can’t affect the outcome when I use mask to mask out the undersireable bits in the rank-select bit-string.

So how do I build a bit-string like mask ?

The information I need to build this bit-string is contained withing the quotes bit-string. If I traverse the quotes bit-string bit-by-bit with the initial state of 1 and I flip my state every-time I encounter a 1 in quotes , I get the bit-string I need.

But this approach undermines the performance of the parser because now we are reduced to parsing the bit-string bit-by-bit, which is just as bad as parsing the CSV text byte-by-byte.

We have failed to exploit data parallelism to give us the performance we want.

But all is not lost.

Let’s look at our quotes bit-string more carefully. There are two kinds of 1 bits in our bit-string. All the 1 bits come in pairs.

In the scheme we just discussed earlier, the first of each pair marked by ( takes our state from 1 to 0 to indicate we have entered the quoted state and the second of each pair marked by ) takes out state from 0 to 1 to indicate we have exited the quoted state.

quotes: 0000000000000(0)(00)0(00000)0(0000)

Let’s say we somehow have a way to split the quotes bit-string into two separate bit-string very efficiently into an enters bit-string and and exits bit-string. Does that put us in a better position?

quotes: 0000000000000(0)(00)0(00000)0(0000) enters: 00000000000001001000010000000100000 exits: 00000000000000010001000000010000001 mask: 1111111111111?0??00?1?00000?1?0000?

Sadly, the path forward still seems unclear.

What if we invert all the bits in exits to produce a new bit-string ~exits ?

quotes: 0000000000000(0)(00)0(00000)0(0000) enters: 00000000000001001000010000000100000 exits: 00000000000000010001000000010000001 ~exits: 11111111111111101110111111101111110 mask: 1111111111111?0??00?1?00000?1?0000?

Hmmm. It looks better because it seems closer to the desired bits in mask .

But the improvement is superficial. I’ve flipped some bits that needed to be a 1 to the desired value, but at a cost of flipping some other bits that need to be a 0 into a 1 as well.

I’ve flipped too much. Perhaps I am no closer after all.

But wait! I’ve not used enters yet!

I may have flipped too much, but enters tells me exactly from which point where I could compensate by flipping the following bits back to 0 .

What operation could possibly do that?

What I have are a bunch of consecutive ones separated by one or more 0 s. The bits I need to flip always form a zero more lengthed suffix of these consecutive 1 s. And the enters bit-string tells me the starting position of all those flips!

There is an operation that allows me to flip runs of 1 bits and it is the humble addition operator + .

If I add enters to ~exits , the 1 bits in enters will cause a cascade of carries starting from their position through the runs of 1 s in ~exits until the next 0 , where it will drop a 1 and the carries will terminate.

Let’s try that and see what we get:

quotes: 0000000000000(0)(00)0(00000)0(0000) enters: 00000000000001001000010000000100000 exits: 00000000000000010001000000010000001 ~exits: 11111111111111101110111111101111110 enters+~exits: 11111111111110010001100000011000001 mask: 1111111111111?0??00?1?00000?1?0000?

Like magic, the erroneously flipped bits corrected themselves, and all the bits that I care about match between enters+~exits and mask .

This means enters+~exits can serve as our mask.

So let’s perform this masking operation on our rank-select bit-strings:

text: aaa,bbb,ccc␍␊"a""aa","b␍␊bb","c,cc" markers: 000100010000100000001000*000100*000 newlines: 000000000000100000000000*0000000000 enters+~exits: 11111111111110010001100000011000001 masked-markers: 00010001000010000000100000001000000 masked-newlines: 00000000000010000000000000000000000

Voilà!

We’ve successfully cleared the erroneously set bits at the positions marked by * and we have the correct rank-select bit-strings with which we can parse all our RFC4180 compliant CSV files without loss of data-parallelism!

Not so fast

I mentioned briefly in order to pull this off I needed an operation that could split my quotes bit-string into separately into two bit-strings that marked the first and second bits of each pair of 1 bits in quotes:

quotes: 0000000000000(0)(00)0(00000)0(0000) enters: 00000000000001001000010000000100000 exits: 00000000000000010001000000010000001

Futhermore, we will need a way to efficient add two bit-strings together.

Without these things, all things fall apart.

But do not fear. There will be a follow up post on how to split bit-vectors into odd and even bits and how to add bit-vectors together. Stay tuned!