/csv_challenge

Parse and sort records of various formats

#CSV Challenge

Write a Ruby program to first assemble a single set of records by parsing data from 3 different file formats and then display these records sorted in 3 different ways.

###Guidelines

We hope that this exercise will allow us to evaluate your skills as a developer. The qualities that we pay special attention to are:

  • Simplicity/elegance of design
  • Adherence to good software engineering principles
  • Maintainability (clean, easy to understand code)
  • Effective use of the standard library
  • Use of unit tests

###Input Data

A record consists of the following 5 fields: last name, first name, gender, date of birth and favorite color. You will be given 3 files, each containing records stored in a different format (sample/comma.txt, sample/pipe.txt, sample/space.txt).

  • The pipe-delimited file lists each record as follows:
    lastName | firstName | middleInitial | gender | favoriteColor | dateOfBirth
  • The comma-delimited (csv) file looks like this:
    lastName, firstName, gender, favoriteColor, dateOfBirth
  • The space-delimited file looks like this:
    lastName firstName middleInitial gender dateOfBirth favoriteColor

You may assume that the delimiters (commas, pipes and spaces) do not appear anywhere in the data values themselves. Write a Ruby program to read in records from these files and combine them into a single set of records.

###Display Requirements

  • Create 3 different views of the recordset and display them in Terminal output (see sample/expected_output.txt):

    • Output 1 – sorted by gender (females before males) then by last name ascending.
    • Output 2 – sorted by birth date, ascending.
    • Output 3 – sorted by last name, descending.

  • Ensure that fields are displayed in the following order: last name, first name, gender, date of birth, favorite color.

  • Display dates in the format MM/DD/YYYY.