Quotes in tab-delimited file

Question

I've got a simple application that opens a tab-delimited text file, and inserts that data into a database.

I'm using this CSV reader to read the data: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx

And it is all working just fine!

Now my client has added a new field to the end of the file, which is "ClaimDescription", and in some of these claim descriptions, the data has quotes in it, example:

"SUMISEI MARU NO 2" - sea of Japan

This seems to be causing a major headache for my app. I get an exception which looks like this:

The CSV appears to be corrupt near record '1470' field '26 at position '181'. Current raw data : ...

And in that "raw data", sure enough the claim description field shows data with quotes in it.

I want to know if anyone has ever had this problem before, and got round it? Obviously I can ask the client to change the data they originally send to me, but this is an automated process that they use to generate the tab-delimited file; and I'd rather use that as a last resort.

I was thinking I could maybe open the file using a standard TextReader before hand, escape any quotes, write the content back into a new file, then feed that file into the CSV Reader. It is probably worth mentioning that the average file size of these tab-delimited files is around 40MB.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers, Sean

Answer 1

Maybe you can open the file with your application and replace each quote with another character and then process it.