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

A reader of my blog found a solution, ="001" & CHAR(44) & "002", it seems workable on my machine!

Answer 2

I was fiddling around with CSV to Excel (i use PHP to create the CSV, but i guess this solution works for any language. When you spot that a leading characters (such as + , - or 0 are disappearing, create the CSV with chr(13) as a prefix. This is a non printable character and it works wonders for my Excel Office 2010 version. I tried other non printable characters, but with no luck.

so i use Chirp Internet solution but tweaked with my prefix:

if (preg_match("/^0/", $str) || preg_match("/^\+?\d{8,}$/", $str) || preg_match("/^\d{4}.\d{1,2}.\d{1,2}/", $str)) {
    $str = chr(13)."$str";
}

Answer 3

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\"" ; 

Answer 4

Do

"""001,002"""

I found this out by typing "001,002" and then doing save-as CSV in Excel. If this isn't exactly what you want (you don't want quotes), this might be a good way for you to find what you want.

Another option might be use tab-delimited text, if this is an option for you.

Answer 5

Kent Fredric's answer contains the solution:

  "=""001,002"""

(I'm bothering to post this as a separate answer because it's not clear from Kent's answer that it is a valid Excel solution.)

Answer 6

All the suggested answers don't seem to work for me right now ("=""blahblah""" and others) in all current Excel versions or Numbers app on OS X.

The only solution I found to be working by fiddling around is to add an escaped null character at the beginning of the string (which is \0 in PHP or C based languages). Everything ends up treated as is without being calculated or processed by the software when opening the calc sheet.

echo "\0" . $data;