Parse CSV file with headers when the headers are part way down the page - ruby

Question

I have a CSV file that, as a spreadsheet, looks like this:
I want to parse the spreadsheet with the headers at row 19. Those headers wont always start at row 19, so my question is, is there a simple way to parse this spreadsheet, and specify which row holds the headers, say by using the "Date" string to identify the header row?
Right now, I'm doing this:
CSV.foreach(params['logbook'].tempfile, headers: true) do |row|
Flight.create(row.to_hash)
end
but obviously that wont work because it doesn't get the right headers.
I feel like there should be a simple solution to this since it's pretty common to have CSV files in this format.

Answer 1

Let's first create the csv file that would be produced from the spreadsheet.
csv =<<-_
N211E,C172,2004,Cessna,172R,airplane,airplane
C-GPGT,C172,1976,Cessna,172M,airplane,airplane
N17AV,P28A,1983,Piper,PA-28-181,airplane,airplane
N4508X,P28A,1975,Piper,PA-28-181,airplane,airplane
,,,,,,
Flights Table,,,,,,
Date,AircraftID,From,To,Route,TimeOut,TimeIn
2017-07-27,N17AV,KHPN,KHPN,KHPN KHPN,17:26,18:08
2017-07-27,N17AV,KHSE,KFFA,,16:29,17:25
2017-07-27,N17AV,W41,KHPN,,21:45,23:53
_
FName = 'test.csv'
File1.write(FName, csv)
#=> 395
We only want the part of the string that begins "Date,".The easiest option is probably to first extract the relevant text. If the file is not humongous, we can slurp it into a string and then remove the unwanted bit.
str = File.read(FName).gsub(/\A.+?(?=^Date,)/m, '')
#=> "Date,AircraftID,From,To,Route,TimeOut,TimeIn\n2017-07-27,N17AV,
# KHPN,KHPN,KHPN KHPN,17:26,18:08\n2017-07-27,N17AV,KHSE,KFFA,,16:29,
# 17:25\n2017-07-27,N17AV,W41,KHPN,,21:45,23:53\n"
The regular expression that is gsub's first argument could be written in free-spacing mode, which makes it self-documenting:
/
\A # match the beginning of the string
.+? # match any number of characters, lazily
(?=^Date,) # match "Date," at the beginning of a line in a positive lookahead
/mx # multi-line and free-spacing regex definition modes
Now that we have the part of the file we want in the string str, we can use CSV::parse to create the CSV::Table object:
csv_tbl = CSV.parse(str, headers: true)
#=> #<CSV::Table mode:col_or_row row_count:4>
The option :headers => true is documented in CSV::new.
Here are a couple of examples of how csv_tbl can be used.
csv_tbl.each { |row| p row }
#=> #<CSV::Row "Date":"2017-07-27" "AircraftID":"N17AV" "From":"KHPN"\
# "To":"KHPN" "Route":"KHPN KHPN" "TimeOut":"17:26" "TimeIn":"18:08">
# #<CSV::Row "Date":"2017-07-27" "AircraftID":"N17AV" "From":"KHSE"\
# "To":"KFFA" "Route":nil "TimeOut":"16:29" "TimeIn":"17:25">
# #<CSV::Row "Date":"2017-07-27" "AircraftID":"N17AV" "From":"W41"\
# "To":"KHPN" "Route":nil "TimeOut":"21:45" "TimeIn":"23:53">
(I've used the character '\' to signify that the string continues on the following line, so that readers would not have to scroll horizontally to read the lines.)
csv_tbl.each { |row| p row["From"] }
# "KHPN"
# "KHSE"
# "W41"
Readers who want to know more about how Ruby's CSV class is used may wish to read Darko Gjorgjievski's piece, "A Guide to the Ruby CSV Library, Part 1 and Part 2".

Answer 2

You can use the smarter_csv gem for this. Parse the file once to determine how many rows you need to skip to get to the header row you want, and then use the skip_lines option:
header_offset = <code to determine number of lines above the header>
SmarterCSV.process(params['logbook'].tempfile, skip_lines: header_offset)

Answer 3

From this format, I think the easiest way is to detect an empty line that comes before the header line. That would also work under changes to the header text. In terms of CSV, that would mean a whole line that has only empty cell items.