Importing CSV that has line breaks within the actual fields

Question

I am using PHP to import a CSV file, which originates from an excel spreadsheet. Some of the fields contain line breaks in them, so when I reopen the csv in excel / open office

Answer 1

I had that problem too and did not find an way to read the data correctly.

In my case it was an one-time-import, so i made an script that searched for all line-breaks within an column and replaced it with something like #####. Then I imported the data and replaced that by linebreaks.

If you need an regular import you could write you own CSV-Parser, that handles the problem. If the text-columns are within "" you could treat everything between two "" as one columns (with check for escaped " within the content).