Simple benchmarking script for comparing different Ruby csv parsers.

Some of these gems will only work with MRI 1.8, as they are native extensions.

Results
=======

Testing csv/presidents.csv

               user     system      total        real
csv        0.020000   0.000000   0.020000 (  0.026629)
fastercsv  0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.001558)
lightcsv   0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.002036)
excelsior  0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000305)
ccsv       0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.011097)
csvscan    0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000221)

Testing csv/geoip.csv

               user     system      total        real
csv       52.720000   0.140000  52.860000 ( 53.465961)
fastercsv 11.090000   0.050000  11.140000 ( 11.327960)
lightcsv   5.470000   0.030000   5.500000 (  5.508147)
excelsior  0.580000   0.010000   0.590000 (  0.592589)
ccsv       0.470000   0.020000   0.490000 (  0.480324)
csvscan    0.420000   0.010000   0.430000 (  0.435153)

Parsing Error Handling
======================

While CSVScan, cCSV, and Excelsior may be the fastest, they do it by having little-to-no error catching/handling.

The slowest three (CSV, FasterCSV, and LightCSV) do catch paring errors and raise exceptions for you to handle.

Credits
=======

Sample CSVs are taken from:
presidents.csv > See People Software (http://seepeoplesoftware.com/downloads/older-versions/11-sample-csv-file-of-us-presidents.html)
geoip.csv 		 > MaxMind (http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry)

If you want to try a (significantly) larger file, MaxMind has a city-level geoip file as well: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity