CSV Parsing

Question

I am trying to use C# to parse CSV. I used regular expressions to find \",\" and read string if my header counts were equal to my match count.

Now this

Answer 1

In order to have a parseable CSV file, any double quotes inside a value need to be properly escaped somehow. The two standard ways to do this are by representing a double quote either as two double quotes back to back, or a backslash double quote. That is one of the following two forms:

""

\"

In the second form your initial string would look like this:

"a","\"b\",\"x\",\"y\"","c"

If your input string is not formatted against some rigorous format like this then you have very little chance of successfully parsing it in an automated environment.