CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javacsvdelimiter
dontknowguy
dontknowguy

Reputation: 93

handling of different delimiters of a csv file

I am new to Java and know the basics by now. I have a csv file which lines are all of the following structure:

Int,,text,text,Int,text,text,text,,text,text,,text,text,,,text,,text,,,Int,Int

I was very confused when I saw that csv file since it is separated by single commas, double commas and triple commas. Sometimes a specific text or int is also empty and excel can´t handle to display the csv in the correct way any more.

So I thought I use Java to write a program to make the columns separated by only one comma. And save the result in a new csv file afterwards. (I haven´t implemented how to write it in another file) With some research I managed to write a File Reader to read the csv file but that´s it. How can I come to my desired result?

What I have done so far: 

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;

class Read {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        FileReader myFile = null;
        BufferedReader buff = null;
        final ArrayList<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();

        try {
            myFile = new FileReader("thisisthepathofthecsvsource");
            buff = new BufferedReader(myFile);
            String line;
            while ((line = buff.readLine()) != null) {

                lines.add(line);

            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Error2 :" + e);
        } finally {
            try {
                buff.close();
                myFile.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                System.err.println("Error2 :" + e);
            }
        }

        final String[][] valuesArray = new String[lines.size()][];
        int cnt = 0;
        for (final String line : lines) {
            valuesArray[cnt++] = line.split(",");
        }

        for (String[] arr : valuesArray) {

            System.out.println(Arrays.toString(arr));
        }
    }

}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2440

Answers (3)

xiaolei yu
xiaolei yu

Reputation: 121

Try the open source library uniVocity-parsers, which provides the solution of columns separator as following:

CsvParserSettings settings = new CsvParserSettings();
settings.setSkipEmptyLines(true);
settings.getFormat().setLineSeparator("\n");
settings.getFormat().setQuote(',');       
settings.getFormat().setQuoteEscape('\\');  // escape the double backslash

Upvotes: 1

davidgiga1993
davidgiga1993

Reputation: 2863

You want to replace one or more commas with one, so why not use a regex replace instead?

 String fileContent = "file,content,,test";
 fileContent = fileContent.replaceAll(",+", ",");

This will replace one or more comma with one comma and therefor should remove all duplicates.

Upvotes: 0

Alaa Abuzaghleh
Alaa Abuzaghleh

Reputation: 1009

you can do that in your while 

String [] dataArr =  line.split(",") ; 
for(String str : dataArr){
     if(str == null || str.equlas("")) continue; 
     System.out.println(str) ; 
}

this will help you to get the comma separator file data.

Upvotes: 0

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