Question

Importing CSV file - how to escape the delimiter inside cells of data?

Asked by: vancetech

I have a PHP script that exports data out of my database into a CSV file that I can download from the webpage and open inside Excel.  I am doing this in one motion where, I click on the download button, and directly open the CSV in excel.

My problem is that some of the comma seperated data, has commas in it that Excel marks as a new seperation when really it is just part of one cell's data.  For example, I have an address field, and a comments field where users routinely enter commas as punctuation.

How can I "escape" these commas as non-seperated data so that they are retained as part of the data?  I've tried using backslashes, double commas, quotes commas but to no avail.

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Asked On
2005-06-27 at 18:48:46ID21472739
Tags

comma

,

delimiter

Topic

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Software

Participating Experts
2
Points
50
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: NicksonKohPosted on 2005-06-27 at 18:54:08ID: 14314681


If your data does not contain double quotes, you can try placing double quotes on each value.

E.g. "apple", "oran,ge", "apple"

Nickson

 

by: byundtPosted on 2005-06-27 at 19:06:03ID: 14314715

Hi vancetech,
The following text was created with NotePad and saved in text format as Book1.csv
"""Data with, comma""",Data without comma,"Data with """"quote"""""
"Data with, comma",Data without comma,"Data with """"quote"""""
"Data with, comma",Data without comma,"Data with ""quote"""

After opening in Excel, it appeared in A1:C3 as:
"Data with, comma"    Data without comma    Data with ""quote""
Data with, comma    Data without comma    Data with ""quote""
Data with, comma    Data without comma    Data with "quote"

If you look at the third line in the NotePad file, you will notice that surrounding the text with double quotes is sufficient to convince Excel to retain the comma within the cell's content. You will also see that text containing double quotes must be surrounded in double quotes, and that each double quote must be doubled.

For a more complete description of the CSV file format, see http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=database

Brad

 

by: vancetechPosted on 2005-06-27 at 20:33:34ID: 14314970

I tried this using NicksonKoh's example, but it didn't work...It appears that comma seperated values can not have spaces after the commas in order for this to work.  byundt's example is the one that worked for me and thus gets the points.

Thank you both for your answers.

 

by: byundtPosted on 2005-06-27 at 20:38:56ID: 14314982

vancetech,
Thanks for the grade!
Brad

 

by: vancetechPosted on 2005-06-27 at 20:41:11ID: 14314986

byundt,

Thanks for your answer!  You provided more information than I requested, much appreciated! Grade is well deserved! :)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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