Dealing with commas in a CSV file

There's actually a spec for CSV format, RFC 4180 and how to handle commas:

Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas should be enclosed in double-quotes.

^{http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180}

So, to have values foo and bar,baz, you do this:

foo,"bar,baz"

Another important requirement to consider (also from the spec):

If double-quotes are used to enclose fields, then a double-quote appearing inside a field must be escaped by preceding it with another double quote. For example:

"aaa","b""bb","ccc"

As others have said, you need to escape values that include quotes. Here’s a little CSV reader in C♯ that supports quoted values, including embedded quotes and carriage returns.

By the way, this is unit-tested code. I’m posting it now because this question seems to come up a lot and others may not want an entire library when simple CSV support will do.

You can use it as follows:

using System;
public class test
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        using ( CsvReader reader = new CsvReader( "data.csv" ) )
        {
            foreach( string[] values in reader.RowEnumerator )
            {
                Console.WriteLine( "Row {0} has {1} values.", reader.RowIndex, values.Length );
            }
        }
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

Here are the classes. Note that you can use the Csv.Escape function to write valid CSV as well.

using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public sealed class CsvReader : System.IDisposable
{
    public CsvReader( string fileName ) : this( new FileStream( fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read ) )
    {
    }

    public CsvReader( Stream stream )
    {
        __reader = new StreamReader( stream );
    }

    public System.Collections.IEnumerable RowEnumerator
    {
        get {
            if ( null == __reader )
                throw new System.ApplicationException( "I can't start reading without CSV input." );

            __rowno = 0;
            string sLine;
            string sNextLine;

            while ( null != ( sLine = __reader.ReadLine() ) )
            {
                while ( rexRunOnLine.IsMatch( sLine ) && null != ( sNextLine = __reader.ReadLine() ) )
                    sLine += "\n" + sNextLine;

                __rowno++;
                string[] values = rexCsvSplitter.Split( sLine );

                for ( int i = 0; i < values.Length; i++ )
                    values[i] = Csv.Unescape( values[i] );

                yield return values;
            }

            __reader.Close();
        }
    }

    public long RowIndex { get { return __rowno; } }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if ( null != __reader ) __reader.Dispose();
    }

    //============================================


    private long __rowno = 0;
    private TextReader __reader;
    private static Regex rexCsvSplitter = new Regex( @",(?=(?:[^""]*""[^""]*"")*(?![^""]*""))" );
    private static Regex rexRunOnLine = new Regex( @"^[^""]*(?:""[^""]*""[^""]*)*""[^""]*$" );
}

public static class Csv
{
    public static string Escape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.Contains( QUOTE ) )
            s = s.Replace( QUOTE, ESCAPED_QUOTE );

        if ( s.IndexOfAny( CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED ) > -1 )
            s = QUOTE + s + QUOTE;

        return s;
    }

    public static string Unescape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.StartsWith( QUOTE ) && s.EndsWith( QUOTE ) )
        {
            s = s.Substring( 1, s.Length - 2 );

            if ( s.Contains( ESCAPED_QUOTE ) )
                s = s.Replace( ESCAPED_QUOTE, QUOTE );
        }

        return s;
    }


    private const string QUOTE = "\"";
    private const string ESCAPED_QUOTE = "\"\"";
    private static char[] CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED = { ',', '"', '\n' };
}

The CSV format uses commas to separate values, values which contain carriage returns, linefeeds, commas, or double quotes are surrounded by double-quotes. Values that contain double quotes are quoted and each literal quote is escaped by an immediately preceding quote: For example, the 3 values:

test
list, of, items
"go" he said

would be encoded as:

test
"list, of, items"
"""go"" he said"

Any field can be quoted but only fields that contain commas, CR/NL, or quotes must be quoted.

There is no real standard for the CSV format, but almost all applications follow the conventions documented here. The RFC that was mentioned elsewhere is not a standard for CSV, it is an RFC for using CSV within MIME and contains some unconventional and unnecessary limitations that make it useless outside of MIME.

A gotcha that many CSV modules I have seen don't accommodate is the fact that multiple lines can be encoded in a single field which means you can't assume that each line is a separate record, you either need to not allow newlines in your data or be prepared to handle this.