Parsing CSV File enclosed with quotes in C#

Question

I\'ve seen lots of samples in parsing CSV File. but this one is kind of annoying file...

so how do you parse this kind of CSV

\"1\",1/2/2010,\"The sample (\"adas

Answer 1

As no (decent) .csv parser can parse non-csv-data correctly, the task isn't to parse the data, but to fix the file(s) (and then to parse the correct data).

To fix the data you need a list of bad rows (to be sent to the person responsible for the garbage for manual editing). To get such a list, you can

1. use Access with a correct import specification to import the file. You'll get a list of import failures.

2. write a script/program that opens the file via the OLEDB text driver.

Sample file:

"Id","Remark","DateDue"
1,"This is good",20110413
2,"This is ""good""",20110414
3,"This is ""good"","bad",and "ugly",,20110415
4,"This is ""good""" again,20110415

Sample SQL/Result:

 SELECT * FROM [badcsv01.csv]
 Id Remark               DateDue   
  1 This is good         4/13/2011 
  2 This is "good"       4/14/2011 
  3 This is "good",        NULL    
  4 This is "good" again 4/15/2011 

SELECT * FROM [badcsv01.csv] WHERE DateDue Is Null
 Id Remark          DateDue 
  3 This is "good",  NULL