This crate provides a streaming CSV (comma separated values) encoder and decoder that works with the Encoder and Decoder traits in Rust's serialize crate. It conforms closely to RFC 4180.

Licensed under the UNLICENSE.

Here is a full working Rust program that decodes records from a CSV file. Each record consists of two strings and an integer (the edit distance between the strings):

extern crate csv;

use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    let fp = &Path::new("./data/simple.csv");
    let mut rdr = csv::Decoder::from_file(fp);

    for (s1, s2, dist) in rdr.decode_iter::<(~str, ~str, uint)>() {
        println!("({}, {}): {}", s1, s2, dist);
    }
}

Don't like tuples? That's fine. Use a struct instead:

extern crate csv;
extern crate serialize;

use std::path::Path;

#[deriving(Decodable)]
struct Record {
    s1: ~str,
    s2: ~str,
    dist: uint,
}

fn main() {
    let fp = &Path::new("./data/simple.csv");
    let mut rdr = csv::Decoder::from_file(fp);

    for record in rdr.decode_iter::<Record>() {
        println!("({}, {}): {}", record.s1, record.s2, record.dist);
    }
}

Do some records not have a distance for some reason? Use an Option type!

#[deriving(Decodable)]
struct Record {
    s1: ~str,
    s2: ~str,
    dist: Option<uint>,
}

You can also read CSV headers, change the separator, use enum types or just get plain access to records as vectors of strings. There are examples with more details in the documentation.

The API is fully documented with lots of examples: http:https://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/csv/.

This will hopefully get easier when the new cargo package manager lands, but for right now, you can either clone the repo and build manually or install with cargo-lite.

From source:

git clone git:https://github.com/BurntSushi/rust-csv
cd rust-csv
rustc -O --crate-type lib ./src/lib.rs # makes libcsv-{version}.rlib in CWD
cd ./examples
rustc -O -L .. ./nfl_plays.rs
./nfl_plays

For cargo-lite:

pip2 install cargo-lite
cargo-lite install git:https://github.com/BurntSushi/rust-csv # installs to ~/.rust
cd ~/.rust/src/rust-csv/examples
rustc -O ./nfl_plays.rs
./nfl_plays

The only other CSV parser I know of that builds is Geal/rust-csv, but it doesn't support the Encoder or Decoder API.

Another one popped up at arjantop/rust-tabular just recently, which also does not support the Encoder or Decoder API. However, it does support parsing fixed-width tables.