SSV means Space-Separated Values, and is an alternative to CSV.

It is meant to be a cleaner format for human-writen data without the hassles of numbers containing commas, particularly on languages that use comma as decimal separator.

Rules

• Values are separated by a sequence of at least one spacing element.
  • A spacing element is either a SPACE (byte value/codepoint 32) or a TAB (byte value/codepoint 9).
  • The first value in a row can be preceded by spacing, which is ignored.
  • The last value in a row can be succeeded by spacing, which is ignored.
• Rows of values are separated by line-breaks. A line-break is an LF (byte value/codepoint 10) optionally preceded by CR (byte value/codepoint 13).
• Values may be enclosed in quotes (").
• Values must be enclosed in quotes in the following cases:
  • the value is empty;
  • the value contains any spacing element;
  • the value contains a line-break;
  • the value contains only quotes;
  • the value is the first thing in a row and starts with a HASH sign (#).
• Values containing quotes are encoded by duplicating the quotes.
• A line starting with the HASH sign (#) is ignored until the next line-break (or end of the content). Such line is considered a comment line.

Example

The following content:

can be encoded as:

"#"  Name        Age  Note
 1   "John Doe"   53  "a.k.a. ""Joe"""
77   Mary         23  ""

Bytes and Chars - modules, imports

This SSV lib has a single generic implementation that is specialized for the "domains":

The generic implementation is in the [engine] module. The modules [bytes] and [chars] have specializations that are aliases for types in the [engine] module. Code using this crate should not have references to the [engine] module, only to the specializations modules.

Reading SSV

Given a byte reader (a value implementing the [std::io::Read] trait), SSV can be read with:

• Tokenizer - an iterator that validates and returns tokens, including spacing, line-breaks and comments.
• Reader - an iterator that returns rows. Each row is a Vec of values.
• read - a utility function that creates a Reader object.

There is also the read_file function that reads from a file given its path.

Writing SSV

Given a byte writer (a value implementing the [std::io::Write] trait), SSV can be written with:

• FluentWriter - an object that writes items with a fluent interface. Delimiters such as spacing and line-breaks are automatically written when required.
• Writer - an object that writes in a row-oriented way.
• write - a utility function that uses a Writer object to write SSV content.

There is also the write_file function that writes to a file given its path.