Btukfyl

I've been using fast-csv as my converter library for a while now. A problem emerged when a client actually attempted to upload a csv files that actually contained ';' as a delimiter instead of the default ','. The NPM documentation explicitly says that all methods should accept an 'option' (don't understand why not an object) to actually switch these flags. Of course I can always go into the source js file and change the delimiter manually, but I'd really like to understand this documentation since its all part of my growing as a developer, but still I can't manage to grasp it on how to actually use these options (delimiter) when parsing it on my code. If none of you guys can understand it either, maybe you have some recommendations regarding csv parsers on javascript? Maybe a manual script would be more versatile and useful?

Documentation sample from (fast-csv on npm):

All methods accept the following options



    objectMode=true: Ensure that data events have an object emitted rather than the stringified version set to false to have a stringified buffer.

    headers=false: Set to true if you expect the first line of your CSV to contain headers, alternatly you can specify an array of headers to use. You can also specify a sparse array to omit some of the columns.

    ignoreEmpty=false: If you wish to ignore empty rows.

    discardUnmappedColumns=false: If you want to discard columns that do not map to a header.

    strictColumnHandling=false: If you want to consider empty lines/lines with too few fields as errors - Only to be used with headers=true

    renameHeaders=false: If you want the first line of the file to be removed and replaced by the one provided in the headers option - Only to be used with headers=[String]

    delimiter=',': If your data uses an alternate delimiter such as ; or t. 

Also, here is a sample code of how it works, and also how I use it (with pipe):

var stream = fs.createReadStream("my.csv");



var csvStream = csv()

    .on("data", function(data){

         console.log(data);

    })

    .on("end", function(){

         console.log("done");

    });



stream.pipe(csvStream);



//or



var csvStream = csv

    .parse()

    .on("data", function(data){

         console.log(data);

    })

    .on("end", function(){

         console.log("done");

    });



stream.pipe(csvStream);

PS: I have tried it asking it elsewhere (where the package is published), but had no replies.

The NPM documentation explicitly says that all methods should accept
an 'option' (don't understand why not an object) to actually switch
these flags

The quoted text basically means that all methods accept a so-called options object as their last parameter. You can specify an alternate delimiter by setting the corresponding field in that object.

but I'd really like to understand this documentation since its all
part of my growing as a developer

I strongly recommend looking at the tests whenever you feel something's not clearly explained in the docs. There's actually a test case for the exact scenario you're describing:

it.should("support semicolon delimiters", function (next) {

    var actual = ;

    csv

        .fromPath(path.resolve(__dirname, "./assets/test16.txt"), {headers: true, delimiter: ";"})

        .on("data", function (data) {

            actual.push(data);

        })

        .on("error", next)

        .on("end", function (count) {

            assert.deepEqual(actual, expected14);

            assert.equal(count, actual.length);

            next();

        });

});