This crate provides a streaming CSV (comma separated values) writer and reader that works with the serialize crate to do type based encoding and decoding. There are two primary goals of this project:

1. The default mode of parsing should just work. This means the parser will bias toward providing a parse over a correct parse (with respect to RFC 4180).
2. Convenient to use by default, but when performance is needed, the API will provide an escape hatch.

Licensed under the UNLICENSE.

Documentation

The API is fully documented with lots of examples: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/csv/.

Simple examples

Here is a full working Rust program that decodes records from a CSV file. Each record consists of two strings and an integer (the edit distance between the strings):

```rust extern crate csv;

use std::path::Path;

fn main() { let fp = &Path::new("./data/simple.csv"); let mut rdr = csv::Reader::from_file(fp);

for record in rdr.decode() {
    let (s1, s2, dist): (String, String, uint) = record.unwrap();
    println!("({}, {}): {}", s1, s2, dist);
}

} ```

Don't like tuples? That's fine. Use a struct instead:

```rust extern crate csv; extern crate serialize;

use std::path::Path;

[deriving(Decodable)]

struct Record { s1: String, s2: String, dist: uint, }

fn main() { let fp = &Path::new("./data/simple.csv"); let mut rdr = csv::Reader::from_file(fp);

for record in rdr.decode() {
    let record: Record = record.unwrap();
    println!("({}, {}): {}", record.s1, record.s2, record.dist);
}

} ```

Do some records not have a distance for some reason? Use an Option type!

```rust

[deriving(Decodable)]

struct Record { s1: String, s2: String, dist: Option, } ```

You can also read CSV headers, change the delimiter, use enum types or just get plain access to records as vectors of strings. There are examples with more details in the documentation.

Installation

This crate works with Cargo. Assuming you have Rust and Cargo installed, simply check out the source and run tests:

bash git checkout git://github.com/BurntSushi/rust-csv cd rust-csv cargo test

You can also add rust-csv as a dependency to your project's Cargo.toml:

toml [dependencies.rust-csv] git = "git://github.com/BurntSushi/rust-csv"

Benchmarks

There are some rough benchmarks (compared with Go) here: https://github.com/BurntSushi/rust-csv/tree/master/bench

Related work

The only other one I know is arjantop/rust-tabular, which does not support the Encoder or Decoder API. However, it does support parsing fixed-width tables.