FasterCSV: Two quick, simple, painless questions

Rails
1

Hi, how is everybody doing?

  1. How do I make sure that the file that is being uploaded is a CSV
    file, and not another kind of file?

  2. Sometimes, when I’m parsing through the CSV file, it tries to read
    the row after the last row, and just reads in a bunch of nils. When I
    look at the row in Excel, it is completely blank, yet FasterCSV still
    tries to read it in. How can I stop this?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Joe

2

On Jul 18, 10:29 am, Joe P. [email protected]
wrote:

Hi, how is everybody doing?

Doing great! Thanks for asking. :slight_smile:

  1. How do I make sure that the file that is being uploaded is a CSV
    file, and not another kind of file?

Since CSV files are plain text files, I’m not sure what kind of
verification you can do, short of trying to read it to see if it is a
CSV file that you expect.

  1. Sometimes, when I’m parsing through the CSV file, it tries to read
    the row after the last row, and just reads in a bunch of nils. When I
    look at the row in Excel, it is completely blank, yet FasterCSV still
    tries to read it in. How can I stop this?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Have you tried to look at the file in another viewer like Notepad to
see the raw text? I suspect you have a trailing row of just commas at
the end.

Jeff

purpleworkshops.com

3

Jeff,
I’ve also used FasterCSV and just pray that some of the longer fields
don’t have escape characters to blow the importation of records.
I appealed with this question to several forums and haven’t been able
to find a solution.
Ultimately, it’d be nice to have something similar to the ex: <%=h
@atx.description %> h verb the way it escapes html characters when
passing the string inside the two delimiters of one field in a .csv
record.
I hope this makes sense??
Kathleen

4

On Jul 19, 10:45 am, “[email protected]” [email protected]
wrote:

Kathleen
Can you give me an example of a CSV field with escape characters in
it? I’m having a hard time imagining what might be causing the
problem.

Thanks,
Jeff

5

Jeff,
I was importing .csv records that had descriptions of inventory items.
Some of these items were medical supplies that had the # sign (#15
Surgical blade) and some had the " sign (2-0 18" Vicryl Suture).
I would be most grateful if you have any ideas on this.
Kathleen