From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2009-11-18T04:19:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Special characters in csv header using fastercsv

On Nov 17, 2009, at 12:58 PM, John Mcleod wrote:

> In your code...
> :header_converters => lambda { |h| h.tr(" ", 
> "_").delete("^a-zA-Z0-9_")},
> 
> what is happening here?
> h.tr(" ", "_").delete("^a-zA-Z0-9_#")
> 
> it looks like you're checking a table row for an instance of " " and 
> replacing with "_"

tr(), for transliterate, is used to replace characters.  You are right that I'm using it to switch all spaces to underscores.

> but I'm unsure of the ".delete("^a-zA-Z0-9_")"

delete() allows me to list characters I want to remove.  It understands simple ranges, like a-z and 0-9.  Also, if the first character is a ^, the entire character set is negated.  Thus my call means delete all non letters, numbers, and underscore characters.

James Edward Gray II