Supporting Singapore's bid to host the Youth Olympic Games 2010
| I just discovered the online campaign to support Singapore’s bid for the Youth Olympic Games 2010. It would be truely great to see the event held here, and Signapore's certainly got the location, facilities, environment and culture to do a great job. And to be fair, better chances than ever hosting the full Olympic Games! So I've registered my support, and you'll see the logo flying on my blog from now on;-) If you want to support the bid on your blog, just register here. |  |
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On Parsing CSV and other Delimited/Quoted Formats
Parsing delimited text that may have quoted elements is a perennial requirement. Quick-and-dirty parses can be achieved with regular expressions, but for more flexible and encapsulated parsing I've been checking out the opencsv java library. Hat tip to Jakub Pawlowski for highlighting the library on his blog
A Regular Expression Approach
Just recently I released and blogged about a JDeveloper Filter Add-in, and it contains a class called ExecShell [API, source] which needs to know how to break a command line into its component arguments. The command line is of course space-delimited, but may use quotes to group an argument with embedded spaces (so a simple split on spaces won't do).
The salient code below uses the REGEX to chop theCmdLine String into theCmdArray Vector of arguments:
Vector<String> theCmdArray = new Vector<String>(0);
String REGEX = "\"([^\"]+?)\"\\s?|([^\\s]+)\\s?|\\s";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(REGEX);
Matcher m = p.matcher(theCmdLine);
while (m.find())
{
theCmdArray.add( m.group().trim() );
}
The regular expression bears a little explaining, and is inspired by this example. Here's how it breaks down:
\"([^\"]+?)\"\\s? | Matches a group within double-quotes. Group is a lazy match on one or more characters except double-quote. Optionally followed by some whitespace |
| |([^\\s]+)\\s? | or Matches a group delimited by whitespace, optionally followed by some whitespace |
| |\\s | Discards a pure whitespace match |
In this case, we are using whitespace as the delimiter (appropriate for command lines). The regex can be adapted for other delimiters by replacing \\s with the delimiter. For example, to handle a comma-separated format:
String REGEX = "\"([^\"]+?)\",?|([^,]+),?|,";
Using OpenCSV
The same space-delimited parsing requirement can be met with a couple of lines and the opencsv library:
CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new StringReader(theCmdArray), ' ');
String[] s = reader.readNext();
Simple, yet currently not so robust. Since we define the delimiter to be a single space (over-ridding the default comma), other whitespace characters (like a tab) will not be recognised. Further, repeated spaces will not be coalesced, but will each be treated as the delimiter for a new element.
Internally, CSVReader parses the input character-by-character and so adapting to handle repeated delimiters as one would be reasonably straight-forward.
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The Right Way To Do Wrong - a good read for security buffs
| The Right Way To Do Wrong - An Exposé of Successful Criminals is a very old book, published in 1906. I was intrigued since it was written by Harry Houdini, and I hadn't realised he was also an author. Houdini's motive for writing the book is to warn off the righteous by educating them in all forms of devious frauds and scams, and to cause those less well intentioned to give pause before taking up a life of crime. Reading the book over 100 years after publication, I am amazed - but perhaps on reflection not surprised - that Houdini manages to describe in great detail just about every Internet-related scam in existence (allowing of course for a transposition of technology)! When he talks of Begging Letter Swindles, think Nigerian Letter or "419" Fraud. For Tricks of Bunco Men, see Advance Fee Scheme. The ease in which Impersonation/Identity Fraud was practiced in a pre-IT age... and just about every other gambit you can find on the FBI Common Fraud Schemes site, or in this great article on Worst Online Scams and Internet Frauds + tips for avoiding them. If you are into IT Security, I think you'd enjoy reading this and mulling over the relevance to your day-to-day work. It is salutary to realise there is nothing new in the Evil that Men do, just new ways of doing it! I listened to The Right Way To Do Wrong in audio from LibriVox. It is also available in print from Amazon. |
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The Right Way To Do Wrong
| The Right Way To Do Wrong - An Exposé of Successful Criminals is a very old book, published in 1906. I was intrigued since it was written by Harry Houdini, as I hadn't realised he was also an author. Houdini's motive for writing the book is to warn off the righteous by educating them in all forms of devious frauds and scams, and to cause those less well intentioned to give pause before taking up a life of crime. Reading the book over 100 years after publication, I am amazed but perhaps on reflection not surprised that Houdini manages to describe in great detail just about every Internet-related scam in existence (allowing of course for a transposition of technology). When he talks of Begging Letter Swindles, think Nigerian Letter or "419" Fraud. For Tricks of Bunco Men, see Advance Fee Scheme. The ease in which Impersonation/Identity Fraud was practiced in a pre-IT age... and just about every other gambit you can find on the FBI Common Fraud Schemes site. If you are into IT Security, I think you'd enjoy reading this and mulling over the relevance to your day-to-day work. It is salutary to realise there is nothing new in the Evil that Men do, just new ways of doing it. I listened to The Right Way To Do Wrong in audio from LibriVox. It is also available in print from Amazon. |
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