Say you have CSV with header as a first row. It contains column names. And you have to parse this CSV. I have always been seeing code which solve this problem but it’s not so convenient and reliable as I wanted. The solution was unreliable and unmaintainable because there were hard-coded indexes for the columns: 0, 1, 2, … and etc. I decided to figure out how to use provided column names instead of numeric indexes. So welcome on broad.

Simple solution

Let’s we have this CSV:

Make; Model; Year
Audi; 80; 1994
Audi; A6; 2005
BMW; 740; 2001

The simplest solution with disadvantages will look like this:

CSV.foreach(file_path, :headers => true, :col_sep => ';') do |row|
  Car.create(:make => row[0], :model => row[1], :year => row[2])
end

Disadvantages of this solution are obvious: if columns’ order changes you will get wrong system behavior and fail.

Robust solution

See how is simple to write more reliable code which solves this problem:

CSV.foreach(file_path, :headers => true, :col_sep => ';') do |row|
  Car.create(:make => row['Make'], :model => row['Model'], :year => row['Year'])
end

Pay attention that you are not able to get values of row through original string representation in symbols (:Make, :Model or :Year) and even through underscored strings/symbols (‘make’ or :make). To achieve this you should make monkey patch which resolves this problem. I won’t provide it here - it’s up to you.

This solution is more reliable - it’s ready for columns’ order changes, it’s readable for humans, it’s not sensible for number of columns. But there is a still possible fail - if there is a mistake in header of CSV this solution will fail too. In this case I can give only one advice - to check header, read column names before parsing. CSV.foreach methods receive more parameters, you can find their here.

PS. Firstly I’ve reinvented bicycle which reads first row and creates hash of indexes for each column (underscored symbol of column name as a key and index number as a value), but @avsej proposed me this solution. Despite the fact that I didn’t find the solution from examples or official docs I’ve learned on more lesson here - don’t invent bicycle. Thanks for @avsej!