Julia Parsing a CSV

Question

Hope the evening is a more than hospitable one and you have traded your emacs terminal for some bonne-vivant Ralph Lauren catalog dinner party type scene. As for me, I'm trying to parse a CSV in Julia and things are deteriorating. Here is my code:

f2 = open("/Users/MacBookPro15/testnovo.csv", "r")

skip(f2, 736)

for line in eachline(f2)
    string_split = split(line, ",")
    println(string_split[1])      
end

Now if I substitute string_split[2] or anything other than [1] I get a BoundsError and it's rather frustrating because I need those items. Can anyone tell me how to avoid this?

Answer 1

Every time I hear "parsing a CSV" I want to duck and cover my ears, before I get flashbacks of a missing quote, or a 32-column line 98% of the way through a 33-column, 10GB csv file.

Fortunately, there are two useful functions that'll prevent you from rolling your own csv parser:

• readcsv in Julia's standard library http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/stdlib/base/?highlight=readcsv#Base.readcsv
• readtable in Dataframe.jl http://juliastats.github.io/DataFrames.jl/io.html