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Rust for the Novice Programmer/CSV Program

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Making a Simple CSV Analysis Program

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In this program, we will learn more about traits, including generics and become more comfortable with programming ideas like collections.

What is CSV?

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CSV or comma separated values is a very simple file format for storing data in a file. Essentially as the name suggests it is just values separated with commas. Each line indicates a new set of values. The first line is headers, indicating what each value means. Here's an example to make it clearer:

Let's say we wanted to store video game characters' stats, we could use something like this:
ID,Attack,Defense,Health,Speed 1,10,20,25,5 2,30,10,10,30 3,40,40,10,10 4,10,40,50,5

Thus we would have 4 characters, our first character would have id: 1, attack: 10, defense: 20, health: 25, speed: 5. Our second character would have id: 2, attack: 30, defense: 10, health: 10, speed: 30. etc.

Program specifications:

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  • Will parse CSV values from a file and print out some stats about them
  • Will feature simple methods for reading new records
  • Will feature simple methods for writing new records

Next: Setting up a CSV file and basic parsing