clean_cover.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'faster_csv'
require 'net/http'
require 'open-uri'

class String
  require 'iconv' #this line is not needed in rails !
  def to_utf8
    Iconv.conv('utf-8','ISO-8859-1', self)
  end
end


puts "opening remote csv file"
handle = open(URI.parse("http://coverinfo.de/download/datenbank.csv"))
puts "beginning to convert"
rows = []

FasterCSV.parse(handle, :skip_blanks => true, :col_sep => ";", :quote_char => "~") do |row|
  rows << row.map {|r| r.to_utf8 if r}
end

#drop first line
rows.shift

FasterCSV.open(File.join(File.expand_path("~"), "clean_cover2.csv"), "w", :col_sep => ",", :quote_char => '"') do |new_row|
  rows.each {|r| new_row << r}
end