parsing tab delimited file in javascript

Question

I can\'t change the server side, but I\'m getting a file that looks like this:

0   20.59339    138402
1   11.20062    75276
2   32.07597    215573
3   12.2029 82         


        

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but if you need to do calculations on the numbers in the data, then you could try something like this:

var data;
$.get('data.txt', function(d){
    data = d;
});

Then split that data first, based on newlines:

data = data.split(/\r?\n/);

Then you can split based on whitespace, and you'll have a reasonable way to look at the data:

var lines = [];
for(var i = 0; i < data.length; i++){
    lines.push(data[i].split(/[ ]+/));
}

Of course, this is a really simple break down... You probably want to change that last part for a bit more ease of access. But, you could just write a function to read a line and manipulate the data accordingly, where

line[0][0] - the index, or line number and first column

line[0][1] - the second column

line[0][2] - third column

ex:

>lines[4]
>["4", "6.800035", "45701"]