RFC 4180 compliant CSV parsing and encoding for Elixir. Allows to specify other separators, so it could also be named: TSV. Why it is not idk, because of defaults I think.

It parses files which contain rows (in utf-8) separated by either commas or other separators.

If that's not enough reason to absolutely ❤️ 💚 💕 ❤️ 💞 💖 it, it also parses a CSV file in order about 2x times as fast as an unparallelized stream implementation 🚀

Now.

Add

{:csv, "~> 1.3.0"}

to your deps in mix.exs like so:

defp deps do
  [
    {:csv, "~> 1.3.0"}
  ]
end

Note: Elixir 1.1.0 is required for all versions above 1.1.5.

Do this to decode:

File.stream!("data.csv") |> CSV.decode

And you'll get a stream of rows. So, this is upcasing the text in each cell of a tab separated file because someone is angry:

File.stream!("data.csv") |>
CSV.decode(separator: ?\t) |>
Enum.map fn row ->
  Enum.each(row, &String.upcase/1)
end

Do this to encode a table (two-dimensional list):

table_data |> CSV.encode

And you'll get a stream of lines ready to be written to an IO. So, this is writing to a file:

file = File.open!("test.csv")
table_data |> CSV.encode |> Enum.each(&IO.write(file, &1))

Pass in another separator to the decoder:

File.stream!("data.csv") |> CSV.decode(separator: ?\t)

If you want to take revenge on whoever did this to you, encode with semicolons like this:

your_data |> CSV.encode(separator: ?;)

Make sure your data gets encoded the way you want - implement the CSV.Encode protocol for whatever strange you wish to encode:

defimpl CSV.Encode, for: MyData do
  def encode(%MyData{has: fun}, env \\ []) do
    "so much #{fun}" |> CSV.Encode.encode(env)
  end
end

Or similar.

The encoding protocol implements a fallback to Any for types where a simple call o to_string will provide unambiguous results. Protocol dispatch for the fallback to Any is very slow when protocols are not consolidated, so make sure you have consolidate_protocols: true in your mix.exs or you consolidate protocols manually for production in order to get good performance.

There is more to know about everything ™️ - Check the doc

MIT