Dealing with commas in a CSV file

Question

I am looking for suggestions on how to handle a csv file that is being created, then uploaded by our customers, and that may have a comma in a value, like a company name.

Answer 1

You can put double quotes around the fields. I don't like this approach, as it adds another special character (the double quote). Just define an escape character (usually backslash) and use it wherever you need to escape something:

data,more data,more data\, even,yet more

You don't have to try to match quotes, and you have fewer exceptions to parse. This simplifies your code, too.