FasterCSV 1.4.0

FasterCSV 1.4.0 is regarded as a convenient as well as a replacement to Ruby's standard CSV library, which is significantly smaller and faster while still being pure Ruby code, and also strives for a better interface.

Major Features:

1. CSV Parsing
   • FasterCSV has a stricter parser and will throw MalformedCSVErrors on problematic data.
   • FasterCSV has a less liberal idea of a line ending than CSV. What you set as the :row_sep is law.
   • CSV returns empty lines as [nil]. FasterCSV calls them [].
   • FasterCSV has a much faster parser.
2. Interface
   • FasterCSV uses Hash-style parameters to set options.
   • FasterCSV does not have generate_row() or parse_row() from CSV.
   • FasterCSV does not have CSV‘s Reader and Writer classes.
   • FasterCSV:open() is more like Ruby‘s open() than CSV:open().
   • FasterCSV objects support most standard IO methods.
   • FasterCSV has a new() method used to wrap objects like String and IO for reading and writing.
   • FasterCSV:generate() is different from CSV:generate().
   • FasterCSV does not support partial reads. It works line-by-line.
   • FasterCSV does not allow the instance methods to override the separators for performance reasons. They must be set in the constructor.

• Added encoding support patch from Michael Reinsch.
• Improved inspect() messages for better IRb support.
• Fixed header writing bug reported by Dov Murik.
• Use custom separators in parsing header Strings as suggested by Shmulik Regev.
• Added a :write_headers option for outputting headers.
• Handle open() calls in binary mode whenever we can to workaround a Windows issue where line-ending translation can cause an off-by-one error in seeking back to a non-zero starting position after auto-discovery for :row_sep as suggested by Robert Battle.
• Improved the parser to fail faster when fed some forms of invalid CSV that can be detected without reading ahead.
• Added a :field_size_limit option to control FasterCSV‘s lookahead and prevent the parser from biting off more data than it can chew.