This little program is my solution to a programming assignment I got as part of the interview process at a company where I applied for a freelance position. It does one thing only: show CSV files or fixed-width files in a simple web app.

This is my first program in Go. I put it on Github to be part of my portfolio. Why it deserves street-cred: I wrote it in only 4 - 6 hours, without having ever written Go before. It shows my ability to quickly learn a new language and get productive with it.

Read on for more info.

Implementation

You can run this app as follows:

• Make sure you have Go installed and your $GOPATH configured and add to your $PATH
• Enter the following in your terminal:

# might require password
$ go get github.com/DandyDev/data-file-viewer
$ data-file-viewer

The application is now serving requests at http://localhost:8080

Features

The application does the following:

• The application will serve your CSV files and fixed-width files in a nice-looking table (Bootstrap thanks!)
  • The path is as follows: /view/<path/to/your/file>. The path needs to be relative to the directory you're running the app from
  • The file extension determines how the file is parsed. Supports CSV as .csv and fixed-width as .prn
• It will automagically infer the file encoding, and convert to proper UTF-8. Even the funky encoding of the example files should pose no problems
• For fixed-width:
  • You can supply the column names as a query parameter: ?columns=col1,col2,col3,col4. Names are case-insensitive. The app will use the supplied column names to calculate where columns begin and end
  • When you don't supply column names, the app will try to infer the column edges by finding common whitespace. This will only work when there's at whitespace between each column of at least 1 character wide. The supplied Workbook2.prn actually doesn't have this because there's no whitespace between the Phone and Credit Limit columns for every row. To be able to demonstrate this feature, I supplied a modified version of this file, Workbook3.prn that does have whitespace between these columns on every row.

Caveats

• This is my first Go-code. I gonna assume the code style sucks, and that I missed some obvious best practices, but I'm happy to learn!
• I tried to do error handling wherever it was sensible to do so, but I'm pretty sure I didn't forsee every scenario
• I'm aware of the good practice of writing tests, especially for critical parts of the software, but between learning Go and being clever with extra features, I kinda ran out of time to write many tests. Try out the testing pkg anyways, I wrote one test to test the function that infers column offsets