[CSV-131] Save positions of records to enable random access

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.1
• Component/s: Parser
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Holger Stratmann
• Created: 07/Sep/14 22:05
• Updated: 02/May/15 08:17

Description

It would be good to have CSVRecord save its position in the source stream.

Reason: Knowing the position of the records would enable random access to retrieve records from the source (after reading it once to build an index) if the file is too large to be read into memory (or if we don't want to read the full file to access a record in the middle).

Additional info: I have created a "random access csv reader" and a "csv viewer" (Swing) for arbitrarily large CSV files. It requires one additional scan of the file to build an index (multi-byte charsets supported). The index can be saved to a file so it only needs to be built once. Because the lexer uses a BufferedReader, we need "internal information" to know where each record starts.
The change to "core" is minor: one field in {{CSVRecord}}s and some associated methods to store the position.
Patch will be attached.
Code for random access (both UI and non-UI) will be proposed (and possibly submitted) as a separate issue. It could also be an independent add-on but requires this one little change to Commons CSV.

Issue Links

• relates to: CSV-151 CSVRecord - method to retrieve original data