Ruby Read Csv File

Id name 1 chocolate 2 bacon 3 apple 4 banana 5 almonds now you re going to learn how to use the ruby csv library to read write csv files.

Ruby read csv file.

This is what a csv file looks like. You can read a file directly. Require csv csv read favorite foods csv or you can parse a string with csv. Call dup before passing if you need a new string.

Although there are various ways to achieve the same results we will be focusing in just 2 of the possible ways read the file entirely with the read method or line by line with the foreach method. Working with csv files in ruby. Each approach has its own pros. Each row has strings separated by commas.

October 09 2015 4 minute read. Add this line to your application s gemfile. It offers tools to enable you to read and write to and from strings or io objects as needed. Today in this intermediate level tutorial we look at different ways to process and manipulate csv files.

Each row and the comma separated strings within each row can be thought of as a single record in a database. Csv is an important file type for data base management and ruby makes it easy for programmers to work with csv files. This library provides a complete interface to csv files and data. Ruby provides csv support in the standard library and it will help us do most of the job very quickly.

Ruby alternatives for parsing csv files. Csv stands for comma separated values and csv files contain rows of text. Ruby comes with a built in csv library. This method wraps a string you provide or an empty default string in a csv object which is passed to the provided block.

Ruby string split slow built in csv ok recommended ccsv fast recommended if you have control over csv format csvscan fast recommended if you have control over csv format excelsior fast recommended if you have control over csv format csv library benchmarks can be found here and here. In ruby you can import your csv file either at once storing all of the file content in memory or read from it row by row. Note that a passed string is modified by this method. Ruby can be easily connected to the databases such as oracle sybase db2 and mysql.

You can use the block to append csv rows to the string and when the block exits the final string will be returned.