Re: reading (parsing) CSV (or Excel) data
Re: reading (parsing) CSV (or Excel) data
- Subject: Re: reading (parsing) CSV (or Excel) data
- From: John Engelhart <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 14:30:11 -0400
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Colin Howarth <email@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like my app ('tis progressing steadily :-) to read some simple tabular
> data. The original file is from Excel, but it's not too much bother to
> convert it to CSV.
>
> Searching the developer docs gets me
>
> "gestaltGraphicsVersion"
>
> which is not good, but googling "cocoa csv" works very well. The first
> couple of thousand hits seem relevant :-)
>
> Before I go through the 550,000 hits (some of them quite old) dare I ask if
> there's one Right Way (TM) to parse this sort of data?
>
One possible solution I haven't seen mentioned yet is to use RegexKitLite (
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/regexkit/RegexKitLite-3.1.tar.bz2). The
documentation has an example that parses CSV strings (
http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/index.html#RegexKitLiteCookbook_PatternMatchingRecipes_TextFiles_ParsingCSVData).
When I did some simple benchmarks parsing CSV files using the
documentations example code, it significantly outperformed other solutions
that I tried. One of those was the MacResearch example that's already been
mentioned, but this was some time ago, so things may have changed and your
milage may vary. It only takes ~17 lines of code to parse CSV strings in to
a NSArray (lines) of NSArrays ('columns') using RegexKitLite, so making
modifications to fit your particular needs is very doable.
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