How to split csv whose columns may contain ,

Question

Given

2,1016,7/31/2008 14:22,Geoff Dalgas,6/5/2011 22:21,http://stackoverflow.com,"Corvallis, OR",7679,351,81,b437f461b3fd27387c5d8ab47a293d35,34

Answer 1

I had a problem with a CSV that contains fields with a quote character in them, so using the TextFieldParser, I came up with the following:

private static string[] parseCSVLine(string csvLine)
{
  using (TextFieldParser TFP = new TextFieldParser(new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(csvLine))))
  {
    TFP.HasFieldsEnclosedInQuotes = true;
    TFP.SetDelimiters(",");

    try 
    {           
      return TFP.ReadFields();
    }
    catch (MalformedLineException)
    {
      StringBuilder m_sbLine = new StringBuilder();

      for (int i = 0; i < TFP.ErrorLine.Length; i++)
      {
        if (i > 0 && TFP.ErrorLine[i]== '"' &&(TFP.ErrorLine[i + 1] != ',' && TFP.ErrorLine[i - 1] != ','))
          m_sbLine.Append("\"\"");
        else
          m_sbLine.Append(TFP.ErrorLine[i]);
      }

      return parseCSVLine(m_sbLine.ToString());
    }
  }
}

A StreamReader is still used to read the CSV line by line, as follows:

using(StreamReader SR = new StreamReader(FileName))
{
  while (SR.Peek() >-1)
    myStringArray = parseCSVLine(SR.ReadLine());
}