From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2010-07-01T00:05:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading String Data as a File

On Jun 30, 2010, at 7:53 AM, Brian Candler wrote:

> Robert Klemme wrote:
>> This is an interesting point of interface design: usually it is more
>> convenient to just pass a file name somewhere and that method opens
>> the file (or URL) and reads the data.  But from a modularity point of
>> view it is generally better to pass an open IO like instance.
> 
> Definitely. The original csv.rb in ruby 1.8 got this very badly wrong.
> 
> The new (faster_csv) interface is capable of this, but it suffers from 
> missing documentation.

I agree that FasterCSV's documentation isn't perfect.  I'm pretty sure all of its functions are documented, but you would need to read the API like a novel to find them.  I've been trying more tutorial style documentation lately, but there again it's hard to reference what you specifically want to know.

I'm open to suggestions and I do take patches.

> IIRR you have to do something like
> 
> FasterCSV.new($stdin).each do |row|
>  p row
> end

That works, yes.

> Since the documented "primary" interface is 
> FasterCSV.foreach("path/to/file.csv"), you have to dig through the code 
> to work out how to handle an open stream.

That's mostly due to a pet peeve of mine.  I often see code that slurps when foreach() would have worked fine.  That's why I try to push that as a first choice.

Do you think it would help if I added Wrapping an IO under the Shortcut Interface on this page?

http://fastercsv.rubyforge.org/classes/FasterCSV.html

James Edward Gray II