README

Summary

Enhanced Plaintext Tables - better than CSV, with multiple tables per file, datatypes and more.

Why should you use EPT instead of CSV?

• Multiple tables within a single file
• Explicit declaration of separators (no guessing whether it's ";", "," or something else)
• Explicit declaration whether the first row is a header or not
• Explicit declaration of encoding (no weird characters like "ä" instead of "ä" anymore)
• UTF-8 as default encoding
• Typed values (Null, Boolean, Integer, Float, Decimal, Currency, Date, DateTime, String)
• Type annotations for columns
• In-document comments

What does this library provide?

• A .ept-file parser
• An EPT String parser
• An IO stream parser
• A .ept-file writer
• An EPT String writer
• An IO stream writer

Installation

• Via rubygems: gem install ept
• From github: git clone git@github.com:apeiros/ept.git && cd ept && rm -f *.gem && gem build *.gemspec && gem install *.gem

Usage

tables = Ept.read_file('examples/full.ept')

Format of a .ept file

A .ept file consists of

• Optional encoding header (must be the first line)
• Comment lines (allowed between and within tables)
• Empty lines between the tables (NOT allowed within tables)
• Tables, with metadata

An example of a minimal .ept file which makes use of defaults:

First name | Last name | Secret Identity | Born       | Age | Fortune
Clark      | Kent      | Superman        | 1932-03-26 | 81  | 32_618.00$
Peter      | Parker    | Spiderman       | 1962-08-15 | 51  |    512.50$

An example of an .ept file which makes use of all features:

% Encoding: utf-8
# This is a comment
% Name: the_table_name
% Record-Separator: LF
% Column-Separator: |
% Headers: true
% Types: false
Value type           | Example Value
Null                 | -
Null                 | +null
True                 | +true
False                | +false
Integer, base 16     | 0xff99cc
Integer, base 10     | -291
Integer, base 8      | 0755
Integer, base 2      | 0b01001100
Float                | -4_256.23e15
Decimal              | 1_235.456
Currency             | 1_235.60$
Date                 | 2013-09-31
Time                 | 12:45:00
DateTime             | 2013-09-31T12:45:00Z
Bare String          | Hello world!
Single Quoted String | 'Hello world!\nBackslash-n'
Double Quoted String | "Hello world!\nAnother line"

Defaults

• Default encoding is utf-8
• Default record separator is LF (linefeed, "\n", 0x0a)
• Default column separator is "|" (0x7c)
• Headers defaults to true
• Types defaults to false
• In ruby, the default name is nil
• In ruby, Null is by default represented by nil
• In ruby, Decimal is by default represented by BigDecimal
• In ruby, Currency is by default represented by BigDecimal
• In ruby, Date is by default represented by Date
• In ruby, Time and DateTime are by default represented by Time

Getting Started

Take a look at the examples directory.

Caveats

This implementation currently only supports UTF-8 encoding.

Links

• Online API Documentation
• Public Repository
• Bug Reporting
• RubyGems Site

License

You can use this code under the {file:LICENSE.txt BSD-2-Clause License}, free of charge. If you need a different license, please ask the author.