[ANN] LuaCSV (original) (raw)

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Hi all,

Recently we were talking about CSV format again, and there was a suggestion that we needed a fast low-level extension [1]

Well, [2] is an attempt to supply that extension. It does the quoting rules correctly, as far as I can tell, but does not do the case where multiline records are encoded in double-quotes. That is an exercise for another day.

It provides an iterator, which returns the same table each time. So for a little inconvenience in some cases, one gets absolutely minimal hit on Lua memory. The returned table does have a copy() method, however.

By default, it looks at the first data line and works out whether they are to convertible to numbers. Thereafter, it keeps a mask of these fields and converts them. This will particuarly help you if you have a lot of numerical data to bring in. (You can always switch it off if it guesses incorrectly)

Tested on Debian 32-bit (gcc), and Windows XP (MS compiler). The zip contains a dll for those poor Windows souls without compilers.

steve d.

1 http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2000-11/msg00134.html 2 http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/sdonovan/lua/luaCSV.zip