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.
I am trying to escape delimiter character that appears inside data. Is there a way to do it by passing option parameters? I can do it from udf, but I am hoping it is possible using options.
val df = Seq((8, "test,me\nand your", "other")).toDF("number", "test", "t")
df.coalesce(1).write.mode("overwrite").format("csv").option("quote", "\u0000").option("delimiter", ",").option("escape", "\\").save("testcsv1")
But the escape is not working. The output file is written as
8,test,me
and your,other
I want the output file to be written as.
8,test\,me\\nand your,other
I'm not certain, but I think if you had your sequence as
Seq((8, "test\\,me\\\\nand your", "other"))
and did not specify a custom escape character, it would behave as you are expecting and give you 8,test\,me\\nand your,other as the output. This is because \\ acts simply as the character '\' rather than an escape, so they are printed where you want and the n immediately after is not interpreted as part of a newline character.
I have generated an HTML tag through C# code. I am able to render correctly in the text area. When I googled it, I found this. To render the HTML tags in the text area, we need to convert the '<','>' into HTML entity references. But when I am trying to replace using String.Replace, it throws an error: Too many characters in character literal
.
string psHtmlOutput="<html><body><table border='0' cellspacing='3' cellpadding='3'><tr><th> Name </th><th>DomainName</th><th>DomainType</th><th>Defualt</th></tr><tr><td>india.local</td><td>india.local</td><td>Authoritative</td><td>True</td></tr></table></body></html>";
psHtmlOutput.Replace('>','>');
psHtmlOutput.Replace('<','<');
Error: Too many characters in character literal
Please help; how can I proceed?
The String.Replace method has two overloads:
One that operates on Strings.
One that operates on Chars.
In C#, single quotation marks are used to specify Char literals. Because you have used single quotes, the second overload of the method has been used. However, your second argument is not a valid character literal because > is not a single character.
So if you actually want to replace the character with a string, just use the overload that takes strings:
psHtmlOutput.Replace(">", ">");
psHtmlOutput.Replace("<", "<");
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;
}
I used SBJsonParser to parse a json string.
inside, instead of hebrew chars, I got a string full of chars in a form like \U05de
what would be the best way to decode these back to hebrew chars,
so i can put these on controls like UIFieldView?
Eventually I ran a loop iterating in the string for the chars \u
in the loop, when detected such a substring, i took a range of 6 characters since that index,
giving me a substring for example \u052v that need to be fixed.
on this string, i ran the method [str JSONValue], which gave me the correct char, then i simply replaced all occurrences of \u052v (for example) with the latter corrected char.