name, age, gender
Bob, 32, M
Stacy, 14, F
...
How do I parse 'Bob', knowing it's the first element on the line, '32'
is the second, 'M' is the last...I've been reading about regular
expressions. Is this the best way to solve this problem? And how exactly
do you use them?
This doesn't handle all CSV specs, but if you know you have pure data
like you show above, these are the rudimentary steps without the
one-liner tricks, so it should be pretty straight forward to understand
each step. Arranging them as methods to a class would be good.
# read the file into a var
if FileTest::exist?(file_name)
file_lines = IO.readlines(file_name)
end
# normalize line endings so it doesn't matter what they are
file_lines.strip!
file_lines.gsub!(/\r\n/,'\n')
file_lines.gsub!(/\r/,'\n')
# normalize comma delimiters so it doesn't matter
# if you have one, two or one,two or one , two etc...
file_lines.gsub!(/\s*,\s*/, ',')
# split lines into a single array of lines
lines_array = file_lines.split('\n')
# split each line into an array
final_data =
lines_array.each do |this_line|
final_data << this_line.split(',')
end
# final_data is now an array of arrays that looks like this:
[
['name', 'age', 'gender'],
['Bob', '32', 'M'],
['Stacy', '14', 'F']
]
So, to get Bob, you'd have to know his line number, and index into the
record array:
final_data[1][0] # Bob
final_data[2][3] # F
-- greg willits
···
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