read tab delimited file in clojure

Question

How do I read a tab-delimited file using Clojure? There may be whitespaces in a line which do not correspond to a tab.

E.g.: transform

some field     another-field     a third field

into

["some field" "another-field" "a third field"]

Answer 1

You can use the data.csv Contrib library:

;; in your :dependencies
[org.clojure/data.csv "0.1.2"]

;; at the REPL
(require '[clojure.data.csv :as csv])

(csv/read-csv
  (java.io.StringReader. "some field\tanother-field\ta third field")
  :separator \tab)
;= (["some field" "another-field" "a third field"])

(Use something like (with-open [rdr (clojure.java.io/reader f)] (vec (csv/read-csv rdr :separator \tab))) to read data from the TSV file f.)