LinearTsvParser 1.1.4

Linear TSV Parser

Reading and writing Linear TSV files in a safe, lossless way.

NuGet package

Available at: https://www.nuget.org/packages/LinearTsvParser

To include it in a .NET Core project:

dotnet add package LinearTsvParser

Examples

Reading a .tsv.gz file:

using System.IO;
using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using LinearTsvParser;

public class Example {
    public void ReadTsv() {
        using (var input = File.OpenRead("/tmp/test.tsv.gz"))
        using (var gzip = new GZipStream(input, CompressionMode.Decompress))
        using (var tsvReader = new TsvReader(gzip)) {
            while(!tsvReader.EndOfStream) {
                List<string> fields = tsvReader.ReadLine();
            }
        }
    }
}

Writing a .tsv.gz file:

using System.IO;
using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using LinearTsvParser;

public class Example {
    public void WriteTsv(List<string[]> data) {
        using (var outfile = File.Create("/tmp/test.tsv.gz"))
        using (var gzip = new GZipStream(outfile, CompressionMode.Compress))
        using (var tsvWriter = new TsvWriter(gzip)) {
            tsvWriter.WriteLine(new List<string>{ "One", "Two\tTwo", "Three" });

            foreach(string[] fields in data) {
                tsvWriter.WriteLine(fields);
            }
        }
    }
}

The writer accepts any enumerable of strings, let it be string[] or List<string>.

You can output the TSV to the standard output by using Console.Out in the constructor:

using System;
using System.IO;
using LinearTsvParser;

public class Example {
    public void WriteTsv() {
        using var tsvWriter = new TsvWriter(Console.Out));

        tsvWriter.WriteLine(new string[] {"One", "Two", "Three"});
    }
}

The Linear TSV format

• Fields are separated by TAB characters
• Text encoding is UTF-8
• The reader can parse lines with any of these three endings: \n, \r\n, \r
• The writer is restricted to output only the \n character as EOL
• Special characters inside the fields are replaced (both ways):
  • Newline ⇒ "\n"
  • Carriage return ⇒ "\r"
  • Tab ⇒ "\t"
  • "\" (backslash) ⇒ "\\"
• The column counts are not validated, they can vary per line.

Benchmark

The benchmark test compares the performace of this library with "native" solutions, which use string replace operations. The solution with string replace (native) uses slightly more memory and is a bit slover than this library (lib). The benchmark test can be found here: BenchTest.cs

Configurations

Run the unit tests: (You can also run them one-by-one from VS Code)

dotnet build -c Debug
dotnet test

Run the benchmark:

dotnet run -c Release

Create package for NuGet:

dotnet build -c Prod
dotnet pack -c Prod