Parsing CSV issues...

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Hi All,
I am writing a routine for reading in data from a CSV I have it opening the file, trimming off the unwanted headers and getting to the data, I can get an entry out and parse it with a foreach() to get the data individually however there seems to be an off set of one which can result in the data being in the wrong place from record to record. If I view the CSV in Excel there is not a visible difference. Can there be some characters inserted by Excel (control characters) that are left when it saves it out as a CSV ?

Posted 12-May-14 4:37am

glennPattonWork3

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OriginalGriff · Answer 1 · 2014-05-12T05:00:00

Solution 1

Glenn, why are you reinventing the wheel?
C# CSV Reader and Writer[^]
A Fast CSV Reader[^]
Will do the job for you, and a lot less hassle than "brewing your own".

Posted 12-May-14 5:00am

OriginalGriff

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glennPattonWork3 12-May-14 11:11am

I did find A Fast CSV Reader while digging around, I was more interested in if Excel can put bits of data in when it saves it, as my prog has all the data in a list box just some extra ','s where there should be...

OriginalGriff 12-May-14 11:24am

What's your data look like? Can you DropBox it?

glennPattonWork3 12-May-14 11:27am

Sure here it is:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66257998/T4%20_%20MasterList_IniLoader%20-%20Copy.csv

OriginalGriff 12-May-14 11:38am

The first thing I notice is that it contains embedded double-quotes, followed by commas - so if your software isn't handling embedded D-Q properly, it's going to look like "off by one" errors on some lines.
What does the problem look like in the list box?

glennPattonWork3 12-May-14 11:45am

Ahh Okay, the old copy it to clipboard trick isn't working give me a min.

glennPattonWork3 12-May-14 11:51am

That was an effort that should be a screen shot:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66257998/ListBoxData.png

OriginalGriff 12-May-14 11:58am

Looks like you aren't handling double quotes at all, judging by the first line in the screenshot: the raw data in the file is:

RG3 Meter,PD25,"5/8"", 58"" X 3/4""",Gallons,...

Which Excel (correctly) evaluates as:

RG3 Meter
PD25
5/8", 58" X 3/4"
Gallons
...

But it looks like you have interpreted it as:

RG3 Meter
PD25
"5/8""
58"" X 3/4"""
Gallons
...

glennPattonWork3 12-May-14 12:01pm

Ahhh, looks like I have to rethink the way I'm parsing it thanks
Glenn

OriginalGriff 12-May-14 12:07pm

:laugh:
Caught me out the first time too - that's why I use those two instead nowadays! ;)