CSV parsing in Common Lisp, data manipulation by columns with data frames

Parsing CSV files is a common task. What are our options? We’ll start with cl-csv, add the data-table library, and present lisp-stat’s data frames. This is another contribution to the Common Lisp Cookbook so you should read it there as this is where it will get updates. With a very simple dataset we could split CSV lines manually (subseq, split-sequence, str:split, cl-ppcre…) but when a column contains the separator, a library starts to be useful. And a library will be even more so to help us manipulate columns by name, to use tabular data structures, to automatically infer the columns’ types, and more. I recommend: for simple use, try cl-csv if you’ll do statistics or want a good dataframes library, go for lisp-stats to work with large datasets, see cl-csv’s :row-fn argument. for the fastest parsing, maybe fare-csv, or DuckDB with cl-duckdb, which can also ingest much more file formats than CSV, including Excel. Long time no see o/ I'm lisping more than ever though. CIEL got new…

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