Regarding Java Split Command Parsing Csv File.

Question

I have a csv file in the below format.

H,"TestItems_20100107.csv",07/01/2010,20:00:00,"TT1198","MOBb","AMD",NEW,,

I require the split command to ignore the commas inside the double quotes . So i used the below split command from an earlier post. Pasted the URL that i took this command

String items[] = line.split(",(?=([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\"]*$)");
System.out.println("items.length"+items.length);

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1757065/java-splitting-a-comma-separated-string-but-ignoring-commas-in-quotes/1757107

When i run for this CSV data I am getting the items.length printed as 8. The last two commas at the end of line after "NEW" are ignored. I want the split command to pick up these commas and return me the length as 10. It's not picking up the null commas if it's in end but it's picking it up if it's in the middle of string. Not sure what i need to modify in the split command to resolve this issue. Also in the csv file Double quotes within the contents of a Text field can be repeated (e.g. "This account is a ""large"" one")

Answer 1

There's nothing wrong with the regular expression. The problem is that split discards empty matches at the end:

This method works as if by invoking the two-argument split method with the given expression and a limit argument of zero. Trailing empty strings are therefore not included in the resulting array.

A workaround is to supply an argument greater than the number of columns you expect in your CSV file:

 String[] tokens = line.split(",(?=([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\"]*$)", 99);

Answer 2

Thanks a lot. It's working now. Could you pls post some good web link for learning regex patterns. I saw some websites but were not good. Also I am new to stackoverflow. How do i assign points for you and close this post?

Answer 3

I don't see any tick icon beow the up/down vote control. I want to vote to close the question. But if i click it it's saying I require 15 reputations not sure how to close the question.

Answer 4

I am trying to get my CSV file to print parsed data to hopper 1 or hopper2 etc. What do I add to the file?