Dealing with commas in a CSV file

Question

I am looking for suggestions on how to handle a csv file that is being created, then uploaded by our customers, and that may have a comma in a value, like a company name.

Some of the ideas we are looking at are: quoted Identifiers (value "," values ","etc) or using a | instead of a comma. The biggest problem is that we have to make it easy, or the customer won't do it.

Answer 1

If you're interested in a more educational exercise on how to parse files in general (using CSV as an example), you may check out this article by Julian Bucknall. I like the article because it breaks things down into much smaller problems that are much less insurmountable. You first create a grammar, and once you have a good grammar, it's a relatively easy and methodical process to convert the grammar into code.

The article uses C# and has a link at the bottom to download the code.

Answer 2

I think the easiest solution to this problem is to have the customer to open the csv in excel, and then ctrl + r to replace all comma with whatever identifier you want. This is very easy for the customer and require only one change in your code to read the delimiter of your choice.

Answer 3

The CSV format uses commas to separate values, values which contain carriage returns, linefeeds, commas, or double quotes are surrounded by double-quotes. Values that contain double quotes are quoted and each literal quote is escaped by an immediately preceding quote: For example, the 3 values:

test
list, of, items
"go" he said

would be encoded as:

test
"list, of, items"
"""go"" he said"

Any field can be quoted but only fields that contain commas, CR/NL, or quotes must be quoted.

There is no real standard for the CSV format, but almost all applications follow the conventions documented here. The RFC that was mentioned elsewhere is not a standard for CSV, it is an RFC for using CSV within MIME and contains some unconventional and unnecessary limitations that make it useless outside of MIME.

A gotcha that many CSV modules I have seen don't accommodate is the fact that multiple lines can be encoded in a single field which means you can't assume that each line is a separate record, you either need to not allow newlines in your data or be prepared to handle this.

Answer 4

I usually do this in my CSV files parsing routines. Assume that 'line' variable is one line within a CSV file and all of the columns' values are enclosed in double quotes. After the below two lines execute, you will get CSV columns in the 'values' collection.

// The below two lines will split the columns as well as trim the DBOULE QUOTES around values but NOT within them
    string trimmedLine = line.Trim(new char[] { '\"' });
    List<string> values = trimmedLine.Split(new string[] { "\",\"" }, StringSplitOptions.None).ToList();

Answer 5

As others have said, you need to escape values that include quotes. Here’s a little CSV reader in C♯ that supports quoted values, including embedded quotes and carriage returns.

By the way, this is unit-tested code. I’m posting it now because this question seems to come up a lot and others may not want an entire library when simple CSV support will do.

You can use it as follows:

using System;
public class test
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        using ( CsvReader reader = new CsvReader( "data.csv" ) )
        {
            foreach( string[] values in reader.RowEnumerator )
            {
                Console.WriteLine( "Row {0} has {1} values.", reader.RowIndex, values.Length );
            }
        }
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

Here are the classes. Note that you can use the Csv.Escape function to write valid CSV as well.

using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public sealed class CsvReader : System.IDisposable
{
    public CsvReader( string fileName ) : this( new FileStream( fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read ) )
    {
    }

    public CsvReader( Stream stream )
    {
        __reader = new StreamReader( stream );
    }

    public System.Collections.IEnumerable RowEnumerator
    {
        get {
            if ( null == __reader )
                throw new System.ApplicationException( "I can't start reading without CSV input." );

            __rowno = 0;
            string sLine;
            string sNextLine;

            while ( null != ( sLine = __reader.ReadLine() ) )
            {
                while ( rexRunOnLine.IsMatch( sLine ) && null != ( sNextLine = __reader.ReadLine() ) )
                    sLine += "\n" + sNextLine;

                __rowno++;
                string[] values = rexCsvSplitter.Split( sLine );

                for ( int i = 0; i < values.Length; i++ )
                    values[i] = Csv.Unescape( values[i] );

                yield return values;
            }

            __reader.Close();
        }
    }

    public long RowIndex { get { return __rowno; } }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if ( null != __reader ) __reader.Dispose();
    }

    //============================================


    private long __rowno = 0;
    private TextReader __reader;
    private static Regex rexCsvSplitter = new Regex( @",(?=(?:[^""]*""[^""]*"")*(?![^""]*""))" );
    private static Regex rexRunOnLine = new Regex( @"^[^""]*(?:""[^""]*""[^""]*)*""[^""]*$" );
}

public static class Csv
{
    public static string Escape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.Contains( QUOTE ) )
            s = s.Replace( QUOTE, ESCAPED_QUOTE );

        if ( s.IndexOfAny( CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED ) > -1 )
            s = QUOTE + s + QUOTE;

        return s;
    }

    public static string Unescape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.StartsWith( QUOTE ) && s.EndsWith( QUOTE ) )
        {
            s = s.Substring( 1, s.Length - 2 );

            if ( s.Contains( ESCAPED_QUOTE ) )
                s = s.Replace( ESCAPED_QUOTE, QUOTE );
        }

        return s;
    }


    private const string QUOTE = "\"";
    private const string ESCAPED_QUOTE = "\"\"";
    private static char[] CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED = { ',', '"', '\n' };
}

Answer 6

Use a tab character (\t) to separate the fields.