AUTO-TEXT

This is a Common Lisp library intended for working with unknown "real-life" text files that hopefully hold data in table form (i.e. CSV files, fixed-width files, etc).

In these cases, given a text file, its useful to finding out the following:

• Which file encoding can we use? UTF-8, 16, 32? ISO-8859-1? Windows-1252?

• Is the file delimited? Which is the delimiter? (i.e. tab, comma, etc)

• Which is the file ending? CR, LF? CR and LF? Does it have mixed encoding? (Files with more than one different end of line indicator(!!))

• Given the above, can we read the file as CSV and get the same amount of columns all the time?

• Can we get how many times each different character appears through a file?

• Can we sample some rows, without having to hold all the file in memory?

Plus

• It does not hold the whole file into memory, so it should work for files of any size.

• It works reasonably fast.

Caveats

The file encoding detection is able to discriminate between:

• Files with BOM: UTF-8, 16LE, 16BE, and 32.

• ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 (Latin european encondings)

• Neither of the above.

This library is intended for working with english or "latin-1" (spanish, french, portuguese, italian) data, thus the choice of encodings.

However, more encoding detection rules can be added or edited in a simple way, see encoding.lisp, the code is simple to understand.

For detection of asian and far eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Greek, see the inquisitor lib. Inquisitor doesn't work with latin or west european languages.

Usage

Main usage:

(ql:quickload "auto-text")

(auto-text:analyze "my-file.txt") 

Sample out:

CL-USER> (auto-text:analyze #P"my.txt" :silent nil)
Reading file for analysis... my.txt
Eol-type: CRLF
Likely delimiter? #\,  
BOM: NIL 
Possible encodings:  UTF-8 
Sampling 10 rows as CSV for checking width...
(:SAME-NUMBER-OF-COLUMNS T :DELIMITER #\, :EOL-TYPE :CRLF :BOM-TYPE NIL
 :ENCODING :UTF-8)
 
CL-USER> (auto-text:analyze #P"file.txt" :silent nil)
Reading file for analysis... file.txt
Eol-type: CRLF
Likely delimiter? #\Return  
BOM: NIL 
Possible encodings:  WINDOWS-1252 
(:DELIMITER #\Return :EOL-TYPE :CRLF :BOM-TYPE NIL :ENCODING :WINDOWS-1252)

Silence messages by passing :silent T

The analyze function will produce a property-list (plist) with the following keys:

• :same-number-of-columns : True if file appears to have the same number of columns when read as a CSV.

• :delimiter : column separator char

• :eol-type : type of end-of-line char (:CR, :LF, :CRLF, :MIXED, :NO-LINE-ENDING)

• :bom-type : if BOM is detected, which is the UTF type reported.

• :encoding : detected encoding.

Sample an arbitrary number of rows (lines) from an arbitrarily-sized file: See sample-rows-string:

(defun sample-rows-string (path &key (eol-type :crlf)
                                     (encoding :utf-8)
                                     (sample-size 10))
  "Sample some rows from path, return as list of strings.
Each line does not include the EOL"
  (loop for rows in (sample-rows-bytes path :eol-type eol-type
                                            :sample-size sample-size)
        collecting 
        (bytes-to-string rows encoding)))

Obtain a histogram or frequency hash-table that will tell you how many times a character appears on the whole file. (NOTE: This reads the file in byte mode): See histogram-binary-file on histogram.lisp

Config

See config.lisp, to config:

• Buffer sizes (important: line buffer size, default 32 KB)

• CSV delimiters to look for.

Hacking

• Feel free to improve the encoding detection rules on encoding.lisp and send me a PR.

• There are more features inside the source code that will later be polished, exported, and 'surfaced' to this readme.

Implementations

So far works on SBCL, CCL, CLISP, and ABCL.

Should run in any implementation where BABEL and CL-CSV work fine!!

Author

Flavio E. also known as defunkydrummer

License

MIT

See also

The aforementioned inquisitor lib. This code shares no code in common with inquisitor.