How to use F# TypeProvider to read PowerBall csv?

2
votes

The powerball schema and separators are not consistent which makes it an unusual file to read. (http://www.powerball.com/powerball/winnums-text.txt)

Sample: Draw Date WB1 WB2 WB3 WB4 WB5 PB PP 09/24/2016 15 07 29 41 20 22 2 09/21/2016 63 67 01 69 28 17 4 09/17/2016 51 19 09 62 55 14 4

Any suggestions?

1
f#f#-data

1 Answers

5
votes

This looks like a "fixed column width" file rather than an ordinary CSV (meaning that the columns are not separated by any single character, but instead have fixed number of characters, with padding spaces).

There is some early work on supporting this in F# Data in the pull request here. We'd welcome any help getting this tested - but you'd need to get the soruce code and build F# Data from source (which is just a matter of running the build script though!)

Alternatively, you could probably do some simple pre-processing on the file before reading it as an ordinary CSV file. Looking at the sample file, using a regular expression to replace 1 or more spaces with a comma would produce regular CSV that the CSV provider can consume.