CSV for Excel, Including Both Leading Zeros and Commas

Question

I want to generate a CSV file for user to use Excel to open it.

If I want to escape the comma in values, I can write it as \"640,480\".

If I want to keep the

Answer 1

Put a prefix String on your data:

 "N001,002","N002,003" 

( As long as that prefix is not an E )

That notation ( In OpenOffice at least) above parses as a total of 2 columns with the N001,002 bytes correctly stored.

CSV Specification says that , is permitted inside quote strings.

Also, A warning from experience: make sure you do this with phone numbers too. Excel will otherwise interpret phone numbers as a floating point number and save them in scientific notation :/ , and 1.800E10 is not a really good phone number.

In OpenOffice, this RawCSV chunk also decodes as expected:

  "=""001,002""","=""002,004"""

ie:

   $rawdata = '001,002'; 
   $equation = "=\"$rawdata\"";
   $escaped = str_replace('"','""',$equation); 
   $csv_chunk = "\"$escaped\"" ;