CsvHelper parse text in a table which is not delimited

Question

Here is my data set which has come from a command which i have no control over the output:

BOOLEANCOLUMN   NAME             CLUSTER          AUTHINFO
                someName         someCluster      SomeMoreData   
*               name2            Data2            Data2

I want to be able to convert this into a class to work with the data, I am trying to use CSVHelper however they headers are not delimited, they are spaced to format the data to be human readable. I currently have a mapping class as so:

public ContextMap()
        {
            Map(m => m.Name).Name("NAME");
            Map(m => m.AuthInfo).Name("AUTHINFO");
            Map(m => m.Cluster).Name("CLUSTER");
            Map(m => m.BooleanColumn).Name("BOOLEANCOLUMN");

        }

but i am getting the exception :

CsvHelper.MissingFieldException: 'Field with name 'NAME' does not exist. You can ignore missing fields by setting MissingFieldFound to null.'

Question: How can I parse this data to a class?

Answer 1

I looked at the documentation and it seems the developer has got plans to implement a fixed width parser but hasn't made it yet.

To get around this issue, I created the following method to convert the data to delimited in code instead:

public static string ConvertFixedWidthToCsv(string data)
    {
        var rows = data.Split(
            new[] { "\r\n", "\r", "\n" },
            StringSplitOptions.None
        );

        var returnRows = new List<string>();

        foreach (var row in rows)
        {

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(row))
            {
                continue;
            }
            var parsed = Regex.Replace(row, @"\s+", ",");

            returnRows.Add(parsed);
        }

        return String.Join("\r\n", returnRows);
    }