I have a csv file with delimiter as , (comma) and few of the data column of same file has comma in it .
Hence while linking / importing the file, data is getting jumbled in next column.
I have tried all possible means like skip column etc , but not getting any fruitful results.
Please let me know if this can be handled through VBA function in ms-access.
If the CSV file contains text fields that contain commas and are not surrounded by a text qualifier (usually ") then the file is malformed and cannot be parsed in a bulletproof way. That is,
1,Hello world!,1.414
2,"Goodbye, cruel world!",3.142
can be reliably parsed, but
1,Hello world!,1.414
2,Goodbye, cruel world!,3.142
cannot. However, if you have additional information about the file, e.g., that it should contain three columns
a Long Integer column,
a Short Text column, and
a Double column
then your VBA code could read the file line-by-line and split the string on commas into an array. The first array element would be the Long Integer, the last array element would be the Double value, and the remaining "columns" in between could be concatenated together to reconstruct the string.
As you can imagine, that approach could easily be confounded (e.g., if there was more than one text field that might contain commas). Therefore it is not particularly appealing.
(Also worth noting is that the CSV parser in Access has never been able to properly handle text fields that contain line breaks, but at least we can import those CSV files into Excel and then import into Access from the Excel file.)
TL;DR - If the CSV file contains unqualified text containing commas then the system that produced it is broken and should be fixed.
Introduction
We have a pretty standard way of importing .txt and .csv into our data warehouse using SSIS.
Our txt/csvs are produced with speech marks as text qualifiers. So a typical file may look like the below:
"0001","025",1,"01/01/19","28/12/18",4,"ST","SMITH,JOHN","15/01/19"
"0002","807",1,"01/01/19","29/12/18",3,"ST","JONES,JOY","06/02/19"
"0003","160",1,"01/01/19","29/12/18",3,"ST","LEWIS,HANNAH","18/01/19"
We have set all our SSIS packages to strip out the speech marks by setting Text Qualifier = "
Problem
However, as some of our data entry is done manually, speech marks are sometimes used - particularly in free text fields such as NAME where people have nicknames/alias. This causes errors in our SSIS loading.
An example of a problematic row would be:
"0004","645",1,"01/01/19","29/12/18",3,"ST","MOORE,STANLEY "STAN"","12/04/19"
My question
Is there a way to somehow strip out these problematic speech marks? i.e. the speech marks surrounding "STAN", so that column would be treated as MOORE, STANLEY STAN.
If there was a way within SSIS to do this, great. If not, we are open to other ideas outside of SSIS.
Solution needs to be scalable as we have hundreds of SSIS packages where this problem can occur.
I have a few suggestions:
I know Excel has a setting that says something like "Treat Consecutive Delimiters as one."
Change your delimiter to something else, like a pipe (the thing above the backslash, not sure what it is called elsewhere, looks like a vertical line). You can distinguish delimiters from quote marks that are meant to be included in the resulting value because any string delimiter either immediately precedes or immediately follows a comma. A quote character anywhere else is not a delimiter.
If you do not need to pass the data through any T-SQL you might want to replace non-delimiter quotes with single quotes or, depending on the final output, maybe the html entity (") instead.
Hope this helps,
Joey
A section of what I'm parsing is this
E,"1"".""0""1","1""/""1""1","3""4""5""6","6""5""4""3",'1"'1"'1"'1","1""1""/"
The parse always stops at '1"'1"'1"'1" right on the first quotation. Nothing after that is put into the table
Its being imported using the transfer text macro from a txt file. I have tried using both text and memo types for the specification and it's still failing. Is there a work around to this?
Edit: Yay setting the text qualifier to none fixes it!
Splitting up your input string into what I believe you think the fields should be:
E,"1"".""0""1","1""/""1""1","3""4""5""6","6""5""4""3",'1"'1"'1"'1","1""1""/"
Even if the second-last field is not impossible to parse (heck, I did it and I'm not really all that clever...), I'm not surprised that Access chokes in it. In my experience with Microsoft Office apps and CSV files the rule is:
Text fields need to be enclosed in double-quotes if they contain commas or double quotes.
So, one might expect 1,O'Rourke,2 to pass, or maybe even 1,'thing,2, but 1,'abc"xyz,2? Not likely.
The workaround would be to fix the input file, e.g., by running it through a pre-processor to fix up the quoting.
I've got a two column CSV with a name and a number. Some people's name use commas, for example Joe Blow, CFA. This comma breaks the CSV format, since it's interpreted as a new column.
I've read up and the most common prescription seems to be replacing that character, or replacing the delimiter, with a new value (e.g. this|that|the, other).
I'd really like to keep the comma separator (I know excel supports other delimiters but other interpreters may not). I'd also like to keep the comma in the name, as Joe Blow| CFA looks pretty silly.
Is there a way to include commas in CSV columns without breaking the formatting, for example by escaping them?
To encode a field containing comma (,) or double-quote (") characters, enclose the field in double-quotes:
field1,"field, 2",field3, ...
Literal double-quote characters are typically represented by a pair of double-quotes (""). For example, a field exclusively containing one double-quote character is encoded as """".
For example:
Sheet: |Hello, World!|You "matter" to us.|
CSV: "Hello, World!","You ""matter"" to us."
More examples (sheet → csv):
regular_value → regular_value
Fresh, brown "eggs" → "Fresh, brown ""eggs"""
" → """"
"," → ""","""
,,," → ",,,"""
,"", → ","""","
""" → """"""""
See wikipedia.
I found that some applications like Numbers in Mac ignore the double quote if there is space before it.
a, "b,c" doesn't work while a,"b,c" works.
The problem with the CSV format, is there's not one spec, there are several accepted methods, with no way of distinguishing which should be used (for generate/interpret). I discussed all the methods to escape characters (newlines in that case, but same basic premise) in another post. Basically it comes down to using a CSV generation/escaping process for the intended users, and hoping the rest don't mind.
Reference spec document.
If you want to make that you said, you can use quotes. Something like this
$name = "Joe Blow, CFA.";
$arr[] = "\"".$name."\"";
so now, you can use comma in your name variable.
You need to quote that values.
Here is a more detailed spec.
In addition to the points in other answers: one thing to note if you are using quotes in Excel is the placement of your spaces. If you have a line of code like this:
print '%s, "%s", "%s", "%s"' % (value_1, value_2, value_3, value_4)
Excel will treat the initial quote as a literal quote instead of using it to escape commas. Your code will need to change to
print '%s,"%s","%s","%s"' % (value_1, value_2, value_3, value_4)
It was this subtlety that brought me here.
You can use Template literals (Template strings)
e.g -
`"${item}"`
CSV files can actually be formatted using different delimiters, comma is just the default.
You can use the sep flag to specify the delimiter you want for your CSV file.
Just add the line sep=; as the very first line in your CSV file, that is if you want your delimiter to be semi-colon. You can change it to any other character.
This isn't a perfect solution, but you can just replace all uses of commas with ‚ or a lower quote. It looks very very similar to a comma and will visually serve the same purpose. No quotes are required
in JS this would be
stringVal.replaceAll(',', '‚')
You will need to be super careful of cases where you need to directly compare that data though
Depending on your language, there may be a to_json method available. That will escape many things that break CSVs.
I faced the same problem and quoting the , did not help. Eventually, I replaced the , with +, finished the processing, saved the output into an outfile and replaced the + with ,. This may seem ugly but it worked for me.
May not be what is needed here but it's a very old question and the answer may help others. A tip I find useful with importing into Excel with a different separator is to open the file in a text editor and add a first line like:
sep=|
where | is the separator you wish Excel to use.
Alternatively you can change the default separator in Windows but a bit long-winded:
Control Panel>Clock & region>Region>Formats>Additional>Numbers>List separator [change from comma to your preferred alternative]. That means Excel will also default to exporting CSVs using the chosen separator.
You could encode your values, for example in PHP base64_encode($str) / base64_decode($str)
IMO this is simpler than doubling up quotes, etc.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base64-encode.php
The encoded values will never contain a comma so every comma in your CSV will be a separator.
You can use the Text_Qualifier field in your Flat file connection manager to as ". This should wrap your data in quotes and only separate by commas which are outside the quotes.
First, if item value has double quote character ("), replace with 2 double quote character ("")
item = item.ToString().Replace("""", """""")
Finally, wrap item value:
ON LEFT: With double quote character (")
ON RIGHT: With double quote character (") and comma character (,)
csv += """" & item.ToString() & ""","
Double quotes not worked for me, it worked for me \". If you want to place a double quotes as example you can set \"\".
You can build formulas, as example:
fprintf(strout, "\"=if(C3=1,\"\"\"\",B3)\"\n");
will write in csv:
=IF(C3=1,"",B3)
A C# method for escaping delimiter characters and quotes in column text. It should be all you need to ensure your csv is not mangled.
private string EscapeDelimiter(string field)
{
if (field.Contains(yourEscapeCharacter))
{
field = field.Replace("\"", "\"\"");
field = $"\"{field}\"";
}
return field;
}
Consider my input data as below:
<xmlnode>line1
line2
line3
</xmlnode>
Right now, I have a map which maps input data to a flatfile schema. I am saving the flatfile as CSV.
Issue is :if input data is having newlines, then the csv format is getting corrupted. The content of 'xmlnode' should go to one single csv column.
Is there is any setting I need to handle this at flat file schema?
Create a functoid with code like the following:
return input.Replace("\r", "").Replace("\n", " ");
The idea is to replace any \r\n with a single space (and handle cases where there's a newline with no carriage return). Should fix your problem.
If this is a problem that will occur routinely on multiple/all nodes from your input, then you might consider running that as a regular expression on the entire message as a string after mapping (rather than having every node pass through your scripting functoid).
As Dan suggessted in Comments, double quotes is also required to save data with \n (new line) in one cell of a csv.
You need to set the "Wrap Character" and "Wrap Character Type" settings in your flat file schema for that field to quote (") and 'Character' respectively. I've used this for the same issue.
Note: There is a "Default Wrap Character" and "Default Wrap Character Type" in the schema settings but BizTalk cleverly defaults the type on fields to "None" rather than "Default" so you still have to go and change the fields even if you set the default.