Ruby unable to parse a CSV file: CSV::MalformedCSVError (Illegal quoting in line 1.)

Question

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Ruby ruby 1.9.3dev (2011-09-23 revision 33323) [i686-linux]

Rails 3.2.9

Following is

Answer 1

from this thread pass the option :quote_char => "|"

CSV.read(filename, :quote_char => "|")

Answer 2

I had a problem with the trademark character that was throwing this error.

The trademark character translates to \"! in UTF-8, so it was the open-ended quotation symbol that was throwing the error. So I did this:

.gsub!("\"!", "")

And then I tried creating my CSV object and it worked fine.

Answer 3

quote_chars = %w(" | ~ ^ & *)
begin
  @report = CSV.read(csv_file, headers: :first_row, quote_char: quote_chars.shift)
rescue CSV::MalformedCSVError
  quote_chars.empty? ? raise : retry 
end

it's not perfect but it works most of the time.

N.B. CSV.parse takes the same parameters as CSV.read, so either a file or data from memory can be used