fsprojects/Zander

Name: Zander

Owner: F# Community Project Incubation Space

Description: Regular expression types for matrix information. I.e. parse structured blocks of information from csv or excel files (or similar 2d matrixes)

Created: 2015-09-17 15:25:31.0

Updated: 2018-03-06 11:56:06.0

Pushed: 2018-03-06 08:34:10.0

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Size: 136

Language: F#

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README

Zander

Named after the fish: Zander. It's a small library to ease with parsing structured blocks of information within a 2-dimensional matrix of information. Typically you get this sort of information from report generators. You might still want to extract this information programmatically, thus the need for the fish.

What problem does this library solve?

When you have data in a structured format, but with different blocks of information. A very simple example is the following:

						Report Title				16/09/15 16:17	Page: 1
Company AB
Some text
that goes on and explains the report
	Id		Value	Type			Attribute 1		Attribute 2
	1244		25	A
	1244		25	B			255		155
	1244		25	C
	1250		25	B			255		100
	1250		25	C
						Report Title				16/09/15 16:17	Page: 2
Company AB
Some text
that goes on and explains the report
	Id		Value	Type			Attribute 1		Attribute 2
	1251		25	A			255
	1251		25	B					130
	1251		25	C
	1260		25	A
	1260		25	B			255		15
	1260		25	C

But the structure of the block layout might change from “page” to “page”.

How do you match?

Match columns

• Use `_` to indicate that there should be an empty column
• Use `"Some constant"or ``constant``` to indicate a column with a constant value
• Use `@Value` to indicate that you want the value on that column
• Use `( .. | .. )` to match any of

Match rows

In order to match rows you supply the row specification with a name by postfixing with ` : title If you want the row to match many rows with the same format you add a '+' : `` : title+```

How does it look?

How do you use this library to extract the information above? You use the parser builder:

g Zander;

 parsed = new BlockEx( @" _          _ _ _ _ _ ""Report Title"" _  _  _  @Time @Page : report_title
                            ""Company AB"" _ _ _ _ _ _                _ _ _ _  _          : company
                                @Text      _ _ _ _ _ _                _ _ _ _  _          : text+
                              _         Id _  Value  Type _ _ ""Attribute 1"" _ ""Attribute 2"" _  _ : header
                              _        @Id _ @Value @Type _ _ (@Attribute1|_) _ (@Attribute2|_) _  _ : row+
                ")
            .Matches(arrayOfArrays);

This will give you structured information that will be easy to consume.