Question

I have a file.csv file with over 180,000 lines in it. I need to pick out only about 8 lines from it. Each of these lines has go the same id so this is what the file would look like:

"id", "name", "subid"
"1", "Entry no 1", "4234"
"1", "Entry no 2", "5233"
"1", "Entry no 3", "2523"
. . . 
"1", "Entry no 8", "2322"
"2", "Entry no 1", "2344"

Is there a way for me to pick out just all the data with the id 1 or another numbers without indexing the whole file into a database (Either SQLITE or Core Data) since this would cause major performance issues for the app to have to index 180,0000 records. This is all for the iPhone and is on ios 5.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Sounds like a good job for Dave DeLong’s CHCSVParser.

It works a bit like NSXMLParser, so you can just skip all the lines you don’t want, and keep the 8 lines you do want.