Importing CSV with line breaks in Excel 2007

Question

I\'m working on a feature to export search results to a CSV file to be opened in Excel. One of the fields is a free-text field, which may contain line breaks, commas, quota

Answer 1

Short Answer

Remove the newline/linefeed characters (\n with Notepad++). Excel will still recognise the carriage return character (\r) to separate records.

Long Answer

As mentioned newline characters are supported inside CSV fields but Excel doesn't always handle them gracefully. I faced a similar issue with a third party CSV that possibly had encoding issues but didn't improve with encoding changes.

What worked for me was removing all newline characters (\n). This has the effect of collapsing fields to a single record assuming that your records are separated by the combination of a carriage return and a newline (CR/LF). Excel will then properly import the file and recognise new records by the carriage return.

Obviously a cleaner solution is to first replace the real newlines (\r\n) with a temporary character combination, replacing the newlines (\n) with your seperating character of choice (e.g. comma in a semicolon file) and then replacing the temporary characters with proper newlines again.