Using CsvBeanReader to read a CSV file with a variable number of columns

Question

So I\'m working on parsing a .csv file. I took the advice of another thread somewhere on StackOverflow and downloaded SuperCSV. I finally got pretty much everything working,

Answer 1

Using uniVocity-parsers you can map CSV files with a varying number of columns to java beans. Using annotations:

class TestBean {

// if the value parsed in the quantity column is "?" or "-", it will be replaced by null.
@NullString(nulls = { "?", "-" })
// if a value resolves to null, it will be converted to the String "0".
@Parsed(defaultNullRead = "0")
private Integer quantity;   // The attribute type defines which conversion will be executed when processing the value.
// In this case, IntegerConversion will be used.
// The attribute name will be matched against the column header in the file automatically.

@Trim
@LowerCase
// the value for the comments attribute is in the column at index 4 (0 is the first column, so this means fifth column in the file)
@Parsed(index = 4)
private String comments;

// you can also explicitly give the name of a column in the file.
@Parsed(field = "amount")
private BigDecimal amount;

@Trim
@LowerCase
// values "no", "n" and "null" will be converted to false; values "yes" and "y" will be converted to true
@BooleanString(falseStrings = { "no", "n", "null" }, trueStrings = { "yes", "y" })
@Parsed
private Boolean pending;
...
}

To parse your CSV into a list of TestBean instances:

// BeanListProcessor converts each parsed row to an instance of a given class, then stores each instance into a list.
BeanListProcessor rowProcessor = new BeanListProcessor(TestBean.class);
CsvParserSettings parserSettings = new CsvParserSettings();
parserSettings.setRowProcessor(rowProcessor);
//Uses the first valid row of the CSV to assign names to each column
parserSettings.setHeaderExtractionEnabled(true);

CsvParser parser = new CsvParser(parserSettings);
parser.parse(new FileReader(yourFile));

// The BeanListProcessor provides a list of objects extracted from the input.
List beans = rowProcessor.getBeans();

Disclosure: I am the author of this library. It's open-source and free (Apache V2.0 license).