How can I parse a CSV string with JavaScript, which contains comma in data?

Question

I have the following type of string

var string = "\'string, duppi, du\', 23, lala"

I want to split the string into an array on each

Answer 1

I have also faced the same type of problem when I had to parse a CSV file.

The file contains a column address which contains the ',' .

After parsing that CSV file to JSON, I get mismatched mapping of the keys while converting it into a JSON file.

I used Node.js for parsing the file and libraries like baby parse and csvtojson.

Example of file -

address,pincode
foo,baar , 123456

While I was parsing directly without using baby parse in JSON, I was getting:

[{
 address: 'foo',
 pincode: 'baar',
 'field3': '123456'
}]

So I wrote code which removes the comma(,) with any other delimiter with every field:

/*
 csvString(input) = "address, pincode\\nfoo, bar, 123456\\n"
 output = "address, pincode\\nfoo {YOUR DELIMITER} bar, 123455\\n"
*/
const removeComma = function(csvString){
    let delimiter = '|'
    let Baby = require('babyparse')
    let arrRow = Baby.parse(csvString).data;
    /*
      arrRow = [
      [ 'address', 'pincode' ],
      [ 'foo, bar', '123456']
      ]
    */
    return arrRow.map((singleRow, index) => {
        //the data will include
        /*
        singleRow = [ 'address', 'pincode' ]
        */
        return singleRow.map(singleField => {
            //for removing the comma in the feild
            return singleField.split(',').join(delimiter)
        })
    }).reduce((acc, value, key) => {
        acc = acc +(Array.isArray(value) ?
         value.reduce((acc1, val)=> {
            acc1 = acc1+ val + ','
            return acc1
        }, '') : '') + '\n';
        return acc;
    },'')
}

The function returned can be passed into the csvtojson library and thus the result can be used.

const csv = require('csvtojson')

let csvString = "address, pincode\\nfoo, bar, 123456\\n"
let jsonArray = []
modifiedCsvString = removeComma(csvString)
csv()
  .fromString(modifiedCsvString)
  .on('json', json => jsonArray.push(json))
  .on('end', () => {
    /* do any thing with the json Array */
  })

Now you can get the output like:

[{
  address: 'foo, bar',
  pincode: 123456
}]