This is a small node module for parsing individual CSV rows. This can be useful if you have, say, a user-provided string that is a "comma-separated" set of strings. Simply splitting on commas doesn't quite suffice.

It has been a little while, but when I last looked, existing node.js CSV modules didn't make it straightforward to just parse a single row of CSV data synchronously.

Follow @trentmick for updates to this module.

Installation

npm install csvrow

This is also a single node.js module (lib/csvrow.js) with no external deps, so you can alternatively just grab that file.

Usage

Typical parsing as you'd expect:

> var csvrow = require('csvrow');
> csvrow.parse('a,b,c')
[ 'a', 'b', 'c' ]
> csvrow.parse(' a, b,, d')
[ 'a', 'b', '', 'd' ]

And the reverse (stringifying):

> csvrow.stringify(['a', 'b', 'c'])
'a,b,c'
> csvrow.stringify(['a', 'space y', 'c'])
'a,"space y",c'

parse and stringify should always cycle to the same value, including with some weird edge cases. See the test suite and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values.

There is also a "normalize" function to get rid of spacing and empty columns:

> csvrow.normalize('a, b, , d')
'a,b,d'

Note: dropping empty entries might not be what you want. Patches welcome to make that optional.

Testing

npm test   # tests with first node version on the path

Versioning

The scheme I follow is most succintly described by the bootstrap guys here.

tl;dr: All versions are <major>.<minor>.<patch> which will be incremented for breaking backward compat and major reworks, new features without breaking change, and bug fixes, respectively.

License

MIT.