How do I sanitize CSV input with the CsvReader?

Question

I'm using the CsvReader library in my Windows Forms application, which is coded in horribly messy VB (I've recently taken over the project.)

I'm currently capable of reading semi-colon separated files without quoting, but I'm having a problem: most of the input has quoted fields, but includes unescaped quote characters within the fields.

I cannot change the input, so I must tackle it somehow. One solution would be to entirely disable quoting -- but I'm not quite sure how to do that...

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

I've only played a little with this library LINQtoCSV, but I think it may help with quoted fields.

Answer 2

How generic do you need it to be? It is quite simple to write your own CSV parser that reads the data into a DataTable.

In some cases parsing the csv file can be as simple as doing a File.ReadAllLines(filename) and then for each line doing a string.Split using a semicolon as the separator to get the columns. Your code will probably be more advanced than that, but if you have specific needs writing it yourself is probably a good idea.

Answer 3

Check out FileHelpers.

Answer 4

What happen if my csv file's text separator is a comma "," But one of the field "content" is with a lot of comma in within. I cannot edit the CSV file. How can i assign each field to a hashtable? Please advise. Thanks.