Re: [Vala] open and read a csv file

[Al Thomas <astavale yahoo co uk>]

> From: Jason Scurtu <scurtu mail de>
> Sent: Thursday, 16 October 2014, 14:42
> Subject: [Vala] open and read a csv file
>
>
> Basicly, I want to open a csv and write the data to a SQLite database and display it in a GridView .. but, 
> how to read a CSV?
> I come from a C# background and I can hardly find any doucumentation or a app that does something similar 
> (code peek).
>
> Please, can someone help me get started. Would really apprieciate it.
>
> I've had a quick look through ValaDoc ( http://valadoc.org/ ) and the Extras repository ( 
> https://github.com/nemequ/vala-extra-vapis ) and can't see any bindings to a CSV parser. So you could 
> consider finding a C library for CSV parsing and writing a Vala API binding.


Alternatively parsing the file yourself could be an option. Use FileStream ( 
http://www.valadoc.org/#!api=glib-2.0/GLib.FileStream ) to open the file and read each line. Vala, from its 
close dependency on GLib, includes a regex library. For an introduction see 
http://ewgeny.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/mighty-perl-like-regular-expressions-regex-with-glib-and-vala/ , for 
details see http://references.valadoc.org/#!api=glib-2.0/GLib.Regex or you can just use string split ( 
http://references.valadoc.org/#!api=glib-2.0/string.split )

Writing your own CSV parser can be harder work if you start getting into details of not splitting quoted 
values. For a discussion see 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1189416/c-regular-expressions-how-to-parse-comma-separated-values-where-some-values
 

Good luck,

Al