FixedWidthFileParser

FixedWidthFileParser is used to parse fixed width files. Crazy right?

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fixed_width_file_parser'

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install fixed_width_file_parser

Usage

In order to parse a fixed width file, you need to define the fields (and their positions) as well as the filepath, and then pass those to a block that will yield the data for each row.

filepath = 'path/to/file.txt'
fields = [
  { name: 'first_name', position: 0..10 },
  { name: 'middle_initial', position: 11 },
  { name: 'last_name', position: 12..25 }
]

FixedWidthFileParser.parse(filepath, fields) do |row|
  puts row[:first_name]
  puts row[:middle_initial]
  puts row[:last_name]
end

Tips

If you need to parse a fixed width file that has the last field set as a variable width field, you can set the position similar to position: 12..-1. Setting the end of the range as -1 will read to the end of that line.

filepath = 'path/to/file.txt'
fields = [
  { name: 'first_name', position: 0..10 },
  { name: 'middle_initial', position: 11 },
  { name: 'last_name', position: 12..-1 }
]

Options

Name	Default Value	Description
force_utf8_encoding	true	Force UTF-8 encoding on lines being parsed. This alleviates invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 errors thrown when trying to split a string with invalid UTF characters. For more information, view this article.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release to create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/elevatorup/fixed_width_file_parser/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request