James Gray
4/18/2007 3:08:00 AM
On Apr 17, 2007, at 9:31 PM, Stephen Smith wrote:
> @James, Right on. I think you're correct - FasterCSV should handle
> the CSV
> reading no problem. I think my first edition might handle writing
> to a flat
> file based on an XML schema. I'm going to try to think about
> generalization
> from the beginning, and see if that keeps my code easier to
> maintain and
> use. When you wrote FasterCSV, how did you bake in the formatting
> rules? Did
> you write an XML schema or something similar based on the CSV RFC?
FasterCSV was born from a discussion on Ruby Core about how we might
speed up the CSV library. I provided some information out of the
book Mastering Regular Expression, which claimed to have a single
expression for parsing the format.
Some edge case that the expression didn't handle where raised, I
fixed those, and that's pretty much FasterCSV's parser to this day.
It's not too glamorous I guess, but I like how it shows what we can
do when we work together.
James Edward Gray II