Ruby: cannot parse Excel file exported as CSV in OS X

Question

I\'m using Ruby\'s CSV library to parse some CSV. I have a seemingly well-formed CSV file that I created by exporting an Excel file as CSV.

However CSV.open(filen

Answer 1

I had similar problem. I got an error:

"error_message"=>"Illegal quoting in line 1.", "error_class"=>"CSV::MalformedCSVError"

The problem was the file had Windows line endings, which are of course other than Unix. What helped me was defining row_sep: "\r\n":

CSV.open(path, 'w', headers: :first_row, col_sep: ';', quote_char: '"', row_sep: "\r\n") 

Answer 2

Try: CSV.open('filename', 'r', ?,, ?\r)

As cantlin notes, for Ruby 2 it's:

CSV.new('file.csv', 'r', :col_sep => ?,, :row_sep => ?\r)

I'm pretty sure these will DTRT for you. You can also "fix" the file itself (in which case keep the old open) with the following vim command: :%s/\r/\r/g

Yes, I know that command looks like a total no-op, but it will work.

Answer 3

Stripping \r characters seemed to work for me

CSV.parse(File.read('filename').gsub(/\r/, ' ')) do |row|
  ...
end

Answer 4

Another option is to open the CSV file or the original spreadsheet in Excel and save it as "Windows Comma Separated" rather than "Comma Separated Values". This will output the file with line endings that FasterCSV is able to understand.

Answer 5

""" When I open up the exported CSV in vim, all the text appears on one line, with ^M appearing between lines.

From the docs, it seems that you can provide open with a row separator; however I am unsure what it should be in this case. """

Read back a sentence ... ^M means keyboard Ctrl-M aka '\x0D' (M is the 13th letter of the ASCII alphabet; 0x0D == 13) aka ASCII CR (carriage return) aka '\r' ... IOW what Macs used to use as a line terminator before OS X.

Answer 6

It seems newer versions of the CSV parser and/or any component it uses read DOS/Windows line endings without issues. Mac OS X's stock one (not sure the version) was not cutting it, installed Ruby 2.0.0 and it parsed the file just fine, without the special arguments...