How to read a CSV file into a .NET Datatable

Question

How can I load a CSV file into a System.Data.DataTable, creating the datatable based on the CSV file?

Does the regular ADO.net functionality allow this?

Answer 1

We always used to use the Jet.OLEDB driver, until we started going to 64 bit applications. Microsoft has not and will not release a 64 bit Jet driver. Here's a simple solution we came up with that uses File.ReadAllLines and String.Split to read and parse the CSV file and manually load a DataTable. As noted above, it DOES NOT handle the situation where one of the column values contains a comma. We use this mostly for reading custom configuration files - the nice part about using CSV files is that we can edit them in Excel.

string CSVFilePathName = @"C:\test.csv";
string[] Lines = File.ReadAllLines(CSVFilePathName);
string[] Fields;
Fields = Lines[0].Split(new char[] { ',' });
int Cols = Fields.GetLength(0);
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
//1st row must be column names; force lower case to ensure matching later on.
for (int i = 0; i < Cols; i++)
    dt.Columns.Add(Fields[i].ToLower(), typeof(string));
DataRow Row;
for (int i = 1; i < Lines.GetLength(0); i++)
{
    Fields = Lines[i].Split(new char[] { ',' });
    Row = dt.NewRow();
    for (int f = 0; f < Cols; f++)
        Row[f] = Fields[f];
    dt.Rows.Add(Row);
}