Parsing CSV files in C#

Question

Is there a default/official/recommended way to parse CSV files in C#? I don't want to roll my own parser.

Also, I've seen instances of people using ODBC/OLE DB to read CSV via the Text driver, and a lot of people discourage this due to its "drawbacks." What are these drawbacks?

Ideally, I'm looking for a way through which I can read the CSV by column name, using the first record as the header / field names. Some of the answers given are correct but work to basically deserialize the file into classes.

Answer 1

Let a library handle all the nitty-gritty details for you! :-)

Check out FileHelpers and stay DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself - no need to re-invent the wheel a gazillionth time....

You basically just need to define that shape of your data - the fields in your individual line in the CSV - by means of a public class (and so well-thought out attributes like default values, replacements for NULL values and so forth), point the FileHelpers engine at a file, and bingo - you get back all the entries from that file. One simple operation - great performance!

Answer 2

If you need only reading csv files then I recommend this library: A Fast CSV Reader
If you also need to generate csv files then use this one: FileHelpers v 2.0

Both of them are free and opensource.

Answer 3

There's no official way I know of, but you should indeed use existing libraries. Here is one I found really useful from CodeProject:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx

Answer 4

In a business application, i use the Open Source project on codeproject.com, CSVReader.

It works well, and has good performance. There is some benchmarking on the link i provided.

A simple example, copied from the project page:

using (CsvReader csv = new CsvReader(new StreamReader("data.csv"), true))
{
    int fieldCount = csv.FieldCount;
    string[] headers = csv.GetFieldHeaders();

    while (csv.ReadNextRecord())
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < fieldCount; i++)
            Console.Write(string.Format("{0} = {1};", headers[i], csv[i]));

        Console.WriteLine();
    }
}

As you can see, it's very easy to work with.