How can I turn a DataTable to a CSV?
The following shorter version opens fine in Excel, maybe your issue was the trailing comma
.net = 3.5
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
string[] columnNames = dt.Columns.Cast<DataColumn>().
Select(column => column.ColumnName).
ToArray();
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", columnNames));
foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
{
string[] fields = row.ItemArray.Select(field => field.ToString()).
ToArray();
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", fields));
}
File.WriteAllText("test.csv", sb.ToString());
.net >= 4.0
And as Tim pointed out, if you are on .net>=4, you can make it even shorter:
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
IEnumerable<string> columnNames = dt.Columns.Cast<DataColumn>().
Select(column => column.ColumnName);
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", columnNames));
foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
{
IEnumerable<string> fields = row.ItemArray.Select(field => field.ToString());
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", fields));
}
File.WriteAllText("test.csv", sb.ToString());
As suggested by Christian, if you want to handle special characters escaping in fields, replace the loop block by:
foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
{
IEnumerable<string> fields = row.ItemArray.Select(field =>
string.Concat("\"", field.ToString().Replace("\"", "\"\""), "\""));
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", fields));
}
And last suggestion, you could write the csv content line by line instead of as a whole document, to avoid having a big document in memory.
I wrapped this up into an extension class, which allows you to call:
myDataTable.WriteToCsvFile("C:\\MyDataTable.csv");
on any DataTable.
public static class DataTableExtensions
{
public static void WriteToCsvFile(this DataTable dataTable, string filePath)
{
StringBuilder fileContent = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var col in dataTable.Columns)
{
fileContent.Append(col.ToString() + ",");
}
fileContent.Replace(",", System.Environment.NewLine, fileContent.Length - 1, 1);
foreach (DataRow dr in dataTable.Rows)
{
foreach (var column in dr.ItemArray)
{
fileContent.Append("\"" + column.ToString() + "\",");
}
fileContent.Replace(",", System.Environment.NewLine, fileContent.Length - 1, 1);
}
System.IO.File.WriteAllText(filePath, fileContent.ToString());
}
}