The SmarterCSV wiki page for Basics says that it's possible to retain blank strings for columns that don't have any data (consecutive commas), but I couldn't find additional information on how to do that.
I assume it's something to do with the data validations step, but I can't figure out what. Thanks!
I haven't played with this gem but it looks like you have a few options that you can pass in:
:downcase_header
:strings_as_keys
:remove_zero_values
:remove_values_matching
:remove_empty_hashes
:convert_values_to_numeric
In this case, looks like you might want to set remove_empty_values to false. This works in the last v1 (1.2.6) version of the gem.
In v2, which is still in pre-release, the format is to use the hash_transformations option to the process method, and to set it as follows: [:none, :strip_spaces] This first turns off all transformations and then turns on the ones you want, so in this case, the removal of blank values is now turned off.