GenericParser

GenericParser is a .NET implementation of a parser for delimited and fixed width format files.

Get Started

Install the latest Nuget package.

Instantiate an instance of the parser:

using (GenericParser parser = new GenericParser(filePath))
{
    while (parser.Read())
    {
      string id = parser["ID"];
      string name = parser["Name"];
      string status = parser["Status"];

      // Your code here ...
    }
}

See below for more examples.

GenericParser Features

• Efficient
• Excellent unit test coverage
• Supports delimited and fixed-width formats
  • For delimited, any custom delimited of a single character is supported
• Supports comment rows (single character marker)
• Supports escape characters (single character only)
• Supports a custom text qualifier to allow column/row delimiters to be ignored (e.g., multi-line data)
• Supports escaped text qualifiers by doubling them up
• Supports ignoring/including rows that contain no characters
• Supports a header row
• Supports the ability to dynamically add more columns to match the data
• Supports the ability to enforce the number of columns to a specific number
• Supports the ability to enforce the number of columns based on the first row
• Supports trimming the strings of a column
• Supports stripping off control characters
• Supports reusing the same instance of the parser for different data sources
• Supports TextReader and String (the file location) as data sources
• Supports limiting the maximum number of rows to read
• Supports customizing the size of the internal buffer
• Supports skipping rows at the beginning of the data after the header row
• Supports XML configuration to configure the parser
• Supports access to data via column name (when a header row is supplied)
• Supports Unicode encoding

GenericParserAdapter Features (Extends GenericParser)

• Supports skipping rows at the end of the data
• Supports adding a line number to each row
• Supports the following outputs - XML, DataTable, and DataSet

GenericParser - Examples

• Parsing file from disk

using (GenericParser parser = new GenericParser(filePath))
{
    while (parser.Read())
    {
      string id = parser["ID"];

      // Your code here ...
    }
}

• Parsing file from stream

using (GenericParser parser = new GenericParser(stream))
{
    // ...
}

GenericParserAdapter - Examples

• Parsing file into a DataSet

using (GenericParserAdapter parser = new GenericParserAdapter(filePath))
{
    var dsResult = parser.GetDataSet();
}