CSV File parsing

["Richard Simes" <ricardo.nz@...>]

Hi List, 
I'm reading in some csv files with lua5.1 and noticed that the format of them can be easily translated into valid lua source:

1, 2, 3, 4
5, 6, 7, 8

could be loaded as a lua program if it was in the form:

tab = {
{ 1, 2, 3, 4 },
{ 5, 6, 7, 8 },

}

While writing a simple csv parser is not tricky ( and there's a perfectly good one here: http://lua-users.org/wiki/CsvHandling
)
It would be good for my purposes if I could use the lua interpreter to read the file - Some values are strings, some are functions and maybe tables.

Is there a way to temporarily change the way the lua interpreter works to add the necesary characters to the file as it's read? 
preferably in lua, but C would be ok too.

I guess the translation could be part of a completely seperate process but would rather it wasn't. 
Any Ideas?


Richard