Fencer is designed to process rows of fixed-length and delimited text data, splitting at designated termination points, converting field values where required and making fields available through named object accessors.

Row formats are defined by subclassing Fencer::Base and using the DSL provided.

class EmployeeRecord < Fencer::Base
 field :department, 50, :string
 field :name, 20, -> s { s.split }
 space 2
 field :age, 4, :integer
end

field takes 3 arguments: a field name, the field length and an (optional) converter.

Fencer::Base::Converters is a Hash that defines some commonly-used converters. It's left un-frozen, so it can be extended as required.

Short-cut methods for the default field types are also available:

class EmployeeRecord < Fencer::Base
  string  :department, 20      => String
  integer :age, 2              => Integer
  decimal :salary, 10          => BigDecimal
end

Additionally, custom conversions can be defined by passing a lambda as the final argument.

Records are extracted on initialisation:

raw_string = "EXAMPLE FORMAT      10   300.04"
fields     = EmployeeRecord.new(raw_string)

And are directly accessible thereafter:

fields.department # => "EXAMPLE FORMAT"
fields.age        # => 2
fields.salary     # => BigDecimal("300.04")

In the case of importing delimiter-separated data, passing the delimiting character as the second argument to new will yield the desired result without any change of layout:

raw_string = "EXAMPLE FORMAT|10|300.04"
fields     = EmployeeRecord.new(raw_string, "|")

fields.department # => "EXAMPLE FORMAT"
fields.age        # => 2
fields.salary     # => BigDecimal("300.04")

Currently, Fencer works with Ruby 1.9 only. Sorry. I wanted Hashes that preserve field-order. Plus, the newer syntax is pretty.

Fencer is also blissfully unaware of any sort of encoding. This is a planned
feature for the 1.0 release.