This may be a (very javascript-esque) mistake, but implicit conversion
to strings is useful when mixing fields and strings in -b/--by field
exprs:
$ ./scripts/csv.py input.csv -bcase='"test"+n' -fn
Note that this now (mostly) matches the behavior when the n field is
unspecified:
$ ./scripts/csv.py input.csv -bcase='"test"+n'
Er... well... mostly. When we specify n as a field, csv.py does
typecheck and parse the field, which ends up sort of canonicalizing the
field, unlike omitting n which leaves n as a string... But at least if
the field was already canonicalized the behavior matches...
It may also be better to force all -b/--by expr inputs to strings first,
but this would require us to know which expr came from where. It also
wouldn't solve the canonicalization problem.
Christopher Haster
14687a20bf