From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-11-20T22:57:14+09:00
Subject: Re: How to use fastercsv to get rows as hashes?

On Nov 20, 2008, at 6:38 AM, sa 125 wrote:

> Hi - I'm fairly new to ruby

Hello and welcome.

> and trying to read a csv file using the fastercsv gem. I managed to  
> read the rows arrays of data using:
>
> require 'fastercsv'
>
> def read_csv
>  path_to_file = "/home/work/some_file.csv"
>
>  # open the csv file to read
>  csv = FasterCSV.open(path_to_file, "r")
>
>  # do stuff on rows as arrays
>  while row = csv.readline
>    #... row will be ["cell1", "cell2", "cell3", ...]
>  end
> end

Looking good.  You can simplify it a bit if you like though:

   def read_csv(path = "/home/work/some_file.csv")
     FCSV.foreach(path) do |row|
       # ...
     end
   end

foreach() is just a shortcut for open() and each(), which works like  
your while loop.

> What I'm trying to understand is how do I get the row as a hash where
> the keys are the column headers (so I don't have to remember where  
> each
> column sits in the array):
>
> #...inside loop
> col1 = row['some column']
> col2 = row['another column']
> #...

The first step is to tell FasterCSV that the file has headers.  You  
can do that by changing this line:

     FCSV.foreach(path) do |row|

to this:

     FCSV.foreach(path, :headers => true) do |row|

When you make that change, row will become a FasterCSV::Row object,  
instead of a normal Array.  It has many features and will allow you to  
access columns by name exactly as you show above.  If you really do  
want a Hash though, you can get it with a simple method call:

   row_hash = row.to_hash

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II