From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-03-17T13:50:05+09:00
Subject: Re: csv updater

On Mar 16, 2006, at 5:28 PM, Geoff wrote:

> 1. It does not retain the double quotes and I would like it to be able
> to do that.
> 2. On a previous version it was working for just the last column. I
> have tried to adjust it to make it work for any column (at least  
> that I
> list in the write(colNum) definition, but it is not working.

I'm pretty sure this does what you want:

Neo:~/Desktop$ ls
csv_filldown.rb test_data.csv
Neo:~/Desktop$ cat test_data.csv
"BegDoc","EndDoc","New"
"Doc1BegDoc","Doc1EndDoc","Test1"
"Doc2BegDoc","",""
"Doc2BegDoc","",""
"Doc3BegDoc","Doc3EndDoc","Test2"
"Doc4BegDoc","",""
"Doc5BegDoc","Doc5EndDoc","New"
Neo:~/Desktop$ cat csv_filldown.rb
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

require "csv"
require "enumerator"

last_row = Array.new

CSV.foreach(ARGV.shift) do |row|
   puts( row.enum_for(:each_with_index).map do |cell, index|
     if cell.empty?
       last_row[index]
     else
       last_row[index] = cell
     end
   end.map { |output| "\"#{output}\""}.join(",") )
end
Neo:~/Desktop$ ruby csv_filldown.rb test_data.csv > output.csv
Neo:~/Desktop$ cat output.csv
"BegDoc","EndDoc","New"
"Doc1BegDoc","Doc1EndDoc","Test1"
"Doc2BegDoc","Doc1EndDoc","Test1"
"Doc2BegDoc","Doc1EndDoc","Test1"
"Doc3BegDoc","Doc3EndDoc","Test2"
"Doc4BegDoc","Doc3EndDoc","Test2"
"Doc5BegDoc","Doc5EndDoc","New"

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II