writecsv

A quick & (very) dirty CSV writer for Nim designed to complement the standard library's parsecsv module.

Warning: Experimental. Use at your own risk.

Usage example

# type
#   CsvRow = seq[string]
#
#   CsvWriter* = object
#     headers*: CsvRow
#     rows*: seq[CsvRow]
#     separator, quote: char

import std/parsecsv
import writecsv

block:
  var
    p: parsecsv.CsvParser
    w: writecsv.CsvWriter

  p.open("./input.csv", separator = ',', quote = '"')
  defer: p.close()

  p.readHeaderRow()
  w.headers = p.headers # Optional: headers can safely be included in the `rows` property

  while p.readRow():
    w.rows.add(p.row) # Append parsed row to `rows` property

  w.writeRows("./output.tsv", separator = '\t') # Optional: `separator` arg. Defaults to ','

Limitations

Custom quote characters are not supported. Quotation marks (") only.

Known Issues

• Newlines cannot be be used within values in the input data. (Planned support)

Todo

Features

• Streaming output to file
• Switch for wrapping all fields in quotation marks (think Python's csv.QUOTE_ALL)
• Limit separators to comma (,), tab (\t), semi-colon (;), or pipe (|)
• Error handling for quotation marks as separators
• Error handling in general

RFC 4180 Compliance

• Line breaks within values (Section 2, def. 6)
• Quotation marks within values (Section 2, def. 7)