Robert Klemme wrote:
>> It's Ruby. ï¿?You can always patch or alias_method_chain the target code if
>> you're willing to bear some slight brittleness.
> 
> Is this always possible?  Wouldn't you need some knowledge of the
> inner workings of the target code?  In this case for example, does it
> open the file with File.open or maybe with File.foreach?

You simply find that part of the code, and replace the offending 
method(s) with something else. In the limit, you replace everything with 
your own code :-)

It would be convenient to be able to mock out File and Dir with a 
virtual, in-RAM filesystem. I'm not aware of a library which does that, 
but in principle I think it could be done.

> This is an interesting point of interface design: usually it is more
> convenient to just pass a file name somewhere and that method opens
> the file (or URL) and reads the data.  But from a modularity point of
> view it is generally better to pass an open IO like instance.

Definitely. The original csv.rb in ruby 1.8 got this very badly wrong.

The new (faster_csv) interface is capable of this, but it suffers from 
missing documentation. IIRR you have to do something like

FasterCSV.new($stdin).each do |row|
  p row
end

Since the documented "primary" interface is 
FasterCSV.foreach("path/to/file.csv"), you have to dig through the code 
to work out how to handle an open stream.
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