Comment by dbro

There is a small program I wrote called csvquote[1] that can be used to sanitize input to awk so it can rely on delimiter characters (commas) to always mean delimiters. The results from awk then get piped through the same program at the end to restore the commas inside the field values.

In principle:

  cat textfile.csv | csvquote | awk -f myprogram.awk | csvquote -u > output.csv

Also works for other text processing tools like cut, sed, sort, etc.

[1] https://github.com/dbro/csvquote