Tabular is a Ruby library for reading, writing, and manipulating CSV, tab-delimited and Excel data.

I extracted it from production code. Still extracting it, actually. I need to read structured data and manipulate it via a common interface before persisting it with ActiveRecord.

Install


sudo gem install tabular

(The gem is hosted on Gemcutter, not RubyForge)

Dependencies


For tab-delimited data: Ruby standard lib

For CSV: FasterCSV (fastercsv.rubyforge.org/) sudo gem install fastercsv

For Excel: Spreadsheet gem (spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/) sudo gem install spreadsheet

Examples


>> table = Table.read(“test/fixtures/sample.csv”) >> table.rows.size

> 4

Access Table Rows by index: >> table

And Row cells as a Hash: >> table[:last_name]

> “Willson”

Usage


Table.read assumes that .txt files are tab-delimited, .csv files are comma-delimited, and .xls files are Excel. It assumes that the first row is the header row, and normalizes the header to lower-case with underscores. E.g., “Last Name” becomes “last_name”.

Table.new accepts an Array of Arrays.

Table.new also accepts an options hash.

:columns option to map columns to a different key or type: :city_state => :location – Maps :city_state column to :location. A column with a “City State” header would be accessed as row :flyer_approved => { :column_type => :boolean } – Coerce :flyer_approved column cells to booleans.

:as => [:csv, :xls, :txt] to override file format

Tests


There’s basic test coverage. More comprehensive test coverage needs to be extracted from original projects. Run ‘rake test’.

Changes


0.0.5 Parse ‘invalid’ m/d/yy dates

Copyright


Copyright © 2010 Scott Willson. See LICENSE for details.