Re: quotation marks in table cell vs. org-babel-ref-resolve

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Greg Minshall <minshall@umich.edu> writes:

> fwiw, tracing, the problem appears to be this line
> ----
> ((eq (string-to-char cell) ?\") (read cell))
> ----
> in =org-babel-read=.
>
> presumably there are many cases where this is the right thing to do.
>
> but, maybe look for a simple =^"[^"]*"$= (i.e., a quotation mark, some
> other stuff, a quotation mark, and *nothing* else in the cell)?
>
> or (heaven help us), something more complicated, with random escaped
> quotation marks inside the "cell"?
>
> cheers, Greg

The key question is what is the use case for having this 'mixed' content
in a table cell?

I really don't like the idea of adding even more regexp processing of
contents in order to resolve complexities in data formats which are
rare.  the benefit of the line you identified is that it is simple and
easy to maintain. There may be edge cases where it does not work
correctly, but perhaps the right solution in those situations is fix the
format of the data in the table rather than complicate the functions
used to extract the data from a table.