Question

I have a kind of csv file, with some extra parameters. I don’t want to write my own parser since I know there are alot of good ones out there. The problem is that I’m unsurtan if there is any parser that could handle my scenario.
My csv file looks like this:

I would like to first read the second lines below # ADM so in this case 3 lines. And the I would like to read the second line after # Prov.

Is there any good parser or reader that I could use that would help me with this, and how would I write to handle my scenario?

The extension of my file is not .csv either, it’s .lab , but I guess thats not going to be a problem ?

Answer 1

Fore, I didn’t see a spefic language for the task, and read too late about c#. Here is a perl solution, but is well commented, so I hope it can be useful and easy to translate to other languages.

Assuming a test file (infile) like:

1
2
3
4
5

#Adm
6                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
7                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

#Prov                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
8                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
9                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

#Adm                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
10                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
11                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

#Prov                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
12                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
13                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

#Adm                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
14                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
15                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

#Prov                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
16                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
17

Content of script.pl:

use warnings;
use strict;

## Assign empty value to read file by paragraphs.
$/ = qq[];

## Arrays to save second row of its section.
my (@adm, @prov);

## Regex to match beginning of section.
my $regex = qr/(?:#(?|(Adm)|(Prov)))/;

## Read file.
while ( <> ) { 

    ## Remove last '\n'.
    chomp;

    ## If matches the section and it has at least two lines...
    if ( m/\A${regex}/ and tr/\n/\n/ == 2 ) { 

        ## Group the section name ($1) and its second line ($2).
        if ( m/\A${regex}.*\n^(.*)\Z/ms ) { 

            ## Save line in an array depending of section's value.
            if ( $1 eq q[Adm] ) { 
                push @adm, $2; 
            }   
            elsif ( $1 eq q[Prov] ) { 
                push @prov, $2; 
            }   
        }   
    }   
}

## Print first lines of 'Adm' section and later lines of 'Prov' section.
for ( ( @adm, @prov ) ) { 
    printf qq[%s\n], $_; 
}

exit 0;

Run it like:

perl script.pl infile

With following output:

7
11
15
9
13
17