WWR - Railsplugin: Fastercsv 1.2.0

Fastercsv 1.2.0

= Read Me

by James Edward Gray II

Description

Welcome to FasterCSV.

FasterCSV is intended as a replacement to Ruby's standard CSV library. It was designed to address concerns users of that library had and it has three primary goals:

1. Be significantly faster than CSV while remaining a pure Ruby library. 2. Use a smaller and easier to maintain code base. (FasterCSV is larger now, but considerably richer in features. The parsing core remains quite small.) 3. Improve on the CSV interface.

Obviously, the last one is subjective. If you love CSV's interface, odds are good this one won't suit you. I did try to defer to that interface whenever I didn't have a compelling reason to change it though, so hopefully this won't be too radically different.

What’s Different From CSV?

I’m sure I’ll miss something, but I’ll try to mention most of the major differences I am aware of, to help others quickly get up to speed:

=== CSV Parsing

FasterCSV has a stricter parser and will throw MalformedCSVErrors on problematic data.
FasterCSV has a less liberal idea of a line ending than CSV. What you set as the :row_sep is law.
CSV returns empty lines as [nil]. FasterCSV calls them [].
FasterCSV has a much faster parser.

=== Interface

FasterCSV uses Hash-style parameters to set options.
FasterCSV does not have generate_row() or parse_row() from CSV.
FasterCSV does not have CSV’s Reader and Writer classes.
FasterCSV::open() is more like Ruby’s open() than CSV::open().
FasterCSV objects support most standard IO methods.
FasterCSV has a new() method used to wrap objects like String and IO for reading and writing.
FasterCSV::generate() is different from CSV::generate().
FasterCSV does not support partial reads. It works line-by-line.
FasterCSV does not allow the instance methods to override the separators for performance reasons. They must be set in the constructor.