Removing whitespaces in a CSV file

Question

I have a string with extra whitespace:

First,Last,Email  ,Mobile Phone ,Company,Title  ,Street,City,State,Zip,Country, Birthday,Gender ,Contact Type

I want to parse this line and remove the whitespaces.

My code looks like:

namespace :db do
task :populate_contacts_csv => :environment do

require 'csv'

csv_text = File.read('file_upload_example.csv')
  csv = CSV.parse(csv_text, :headers => true)
    csv.each do |row|
      puts "First Name: #{row['First']} \nLast Name: #{row['Last']} \nEmail: #{row['Email']}"
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

@prices = CSV.parse(IO.read('prices.csv'), :headers=>true, 
   :header_converters=> lambda {|f| f.strip},
   :converters=> lambda {|f| f ? f.strip : nil})

The nil test is added to the row but not header converters assuming that the headers are never nil, while the data might be, and nil doesn't have a strip method. I'm really surprised that, AFAIK, :strip is not a pre-defined converter!

Answer 2

You can strip your hash first:

csv.each do |unstriped_row|
  row = {}
  unstriped_row.each{|k, v| row[k.strip] = v.strip}
  puts "First Name: #{row['First']} \nLast Name: #{row['Last']} \nEmail: #{row['Email']}"
end

Edited to strip hash keys too