/ 
Text-ECSV-0.02
River stage zero No dependents
/ Text::ECSV

NAME

Text::ECSV - Extended CSV manipulation routines

SYNOPSIS

use Text::ECSV;
$ecsv    = Text::ECSV->new ();         # create a new object
$line    = 'id=3,name=Text::ECSV,shot_desc=Extended CSV manipulation routines';
$status  = $ecsv->parse ($line);       # parse a CSV string into fields
                                       #    and name value pairs
%columns = $ecsv->fields_hash ();      # get the parsed field hash
$column  = $ecsv->field_named('id');   # get field value for given name

$ecsv->combine('b' => 2, 'a' => 1, 'c' => 3, );
# ok($ecsv->string eq 'b=2,a=1,c=3');

DESCRIPTION

use base 'Text::CSV_XS'; => see Text::CSV_XS.

Roland Giersig had a presentation at YAPC 2007 called 'Techniques for Remote System-Monitoring'. He was explaining his search after a good logging format or how to store continuous flow of data in a most usable form. XML? YAML? CSV? XML is nice but for a machines not for humans, YAML is nice for both but it's hard to grep. CSV is readable and grep-able but not too flexible. So what is the conclusion? ECSV is like a CSV but in each comma separated field the name of the column is set. This gives a flexibility to skip, reorder, add the fields. All the information is stored per line so it's easy to grep. Also it's easy to compare two records by md5ing the lines or doing string eq.

PROPERTIES

fields_hash

Holds hash reference to the resulting hash constructed by parse().

dup_keys_strategy

If set and a duplicate key names occur in a parsed line, this strategy is called with ->($name, $old_value, $value).

Can be used for duplicate keys to join values to one string, or push them to an array or to treat them how ever is desired. By default values overwrite each other.

METHODS

field_named($name)

Return field with $name.

parse()

In additional to the SUPER::parse() functionality it decodes name value pairs to fill in fields_hash.

combine($key => $value, ...)

The function joins all $key.'='.$value and then calls SUPER::combine constructing a CSV from the arguments, returning success or failure.

AUTHOR

Jozef Kutej, <jkutej@cpan.org>, thanks to Roland Giersig <RGiersig@cpan.org> for the idea.

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-text-ecsv at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Text-ECSV. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc Text::ECSV

You can also look for information at:

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright 2008 Jozef Kutej, all rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.