Converting ASN.1 types to CSV output is not always very straightforward. It is akin to normalizing a database, except that there is only one table. For complex types, it is necessary to duplicate information across several rows.

No standards currently exist for converting ASN.1 to CSV. This chapter describes how ASN2CSV has attempted to answer the problems that naturally arise from trying to compress nested BER data to a flat data file.

We may divide conversion into roughly two steps: collecting the column headers and then outputting the column data. Header information comes from parsing the input specification, while the column data are found in the actual encoded content. This documentation is primarily concerned with how the column headers are collected.