CSVobj

Deprecated

This gem is deprecated. Ruby 1.9 adopted FasterCSV as the new standard CSV library and consequently native ruby contains equivalent functionality. This gem is therefore no longer being maintained.

Here is the equivalent example from below translated to ruby 1.9 CSV:

require 'csv'

csv = CSV.read( ARGV[0], :headers => true )
csv.each { |row| puts row['Last Name'] }

Aims

CSVobj has two simple aims in the processing of CSV files:

• clarity

• robustness

It achieves these aims by automatically instantiating a class with dynamic attributes that can be used to refer to each column of the CSV by name. Each attribute name is derived in a predictable fashion from the column headers (the first row of the CSV).

Clarity

Rather than referring programatically to the “third element of the row” (“row”) one can simply say “row.last_name”.

Robustness

Any change to the CSV format (eg by inserting a new column between two existing columns) will not require a program change: you do not need to hunt down all references to “row” and make them “row”; they remain “row.last_name”.

Example

Given the following CSV file:

First Name,Last Name
Cheryl,James
Sandra,Denton
Deidra,Roper

we can extract just the last names as follows:

# Get the gem
require 'rubygems'
require 'csvobj'

# Subclass because #parse defines methods on the class
class MyCsv < CSVobj ; end

# First command line argument is CSV file to read
csv_file = File.new( ARGV[0] )

# Parse the file, print the "last name" column of each row
MyCsv.parse(csv_file).each do |row|
  puts row.last_name
end