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.