[xclite]

Ruby is an excellent language for quick and easy file processing. One way to practice ruby's file processing tools is to create a small csv parsing library.

For this exercise, try writing a script to parse and return information from a given csv script. There is no character limit or performance goal (although obtuse slowness is discouraged).

The script should support files with or without headers, and if the file has a header it should allow you to get values from each row by column name. The CSV library should be able to handle any CSV file.

For extra points (not that anybody's assigning points), make it possible to iterate over the rows in the file and the columns in a row.

This post has been edited by xclite: 05 May 2011 - 06:34 AM

[Sergio Tapia]

I wrote a blog post about this.

SPOILERS OF COURSE!
http://www.dreaminco...file-with-ruby/

Here's the code, first I created a Car class to hold values.

Spoiler

class Car
attr_accessor :year, :make, :model, :length

def initialize(year, make, model, length)
@year = year
@make = make
@model = model
@length = length
end

def to_s
"Year: #{@year} | Make: #{@make} | Model: #{@model} | Length: #{@length}"
end
end

Then comes the magic:

Spoiler

#This is similar to C#'s using statements.
require 'csv'

cars = Array.new
CSV.foreach('/home/stapiagutierrez/Desktop/cars.csv') do |row|
  cars << Car.new(*row)
end

Huzzah, god damn Ruby is sexy.

This post has been edited by Sergio Tapia: 21 April 2011 - 06:22 PM

[xclite]

Hm, I should have clarified that the csv library should be applicable to any sort of CSV, rather than a known format =p

[Sergio Tapia]

But a CSV by definition is a collection of comma separated values.

[xclite]

I mean that you don't know it's a car. Basically, I'm not saying use a CSV to populate an object, I'm saying create a useful CSV API.

[NotarySojac]

Hey, snappy script, Sergio Tapia! Do you know how to get the fields into a mysql database with the proper datatypes (prescribed in the cars object definition of course).