On 11/20/13 12:51 PM, Scott Prater wrote:
I think the issue comes down to a distinction between a stream and a record. Ideally, the ruby-marc library would keep pointers to which record it is in, where the record begins, and where the record ends in the stream. If a valid header and end-of-record delimiter are in place, then the library should be able to reject the record if it contains garbage in between those two points, without compromising the integrity of the entire stream.
I understand what you're saying, and why it's attractive. I am not sure if ruby-marc can do that right now. I am not personally interested in adding that at this particular time -- I just spent a couple days adding Marc8 support in the first place, and that's enough for me for now. I was just soliciting some feedback on a point I wasn't sure about with the new MARC8 api, honestly.
But pull requests are always welcome! Also feel free to check out ruby-marc to see if it accomodates your desired usage already or not, and let us know, even without a pull request!
If you (or anyone) are interested in checking out the MARC8 support added to ruby-marc, it's currently in a branch not yet merged in or released, but probably will be soon.
https://github.com/ruby-marc/ruby-marc/tree/marc8 https://github.com/ruby-marc/ruby-marc/pull/23
