· java

Java: Parsing CSV files

As I mentioned in a previous post I recently moved a bunch of neo4j data loading code from Ruby to Java and as part of that process I needed to parse some CSV files.

In Ruby I was using FasterCSV which became the standard CSV library from Ruby 1.9 but it’s been a while since I had to parse CSV files in Java so I wasn’t sure which library to use.

I needed a library which could parse a comma separated file where there might be commas in the values of one of the fields. I think that’s fairly standard behaviour in any CSV library but my googling led me to OpenCSV.

It can be downloaded from here and so far seems to do the job!

This is an example of how I’m using it:

String filePath = "/Users/mneedham/data/awesome-csv-file.csv";
CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader(filePath), ',');

List<String[]> csvEntries = reader.readAll();
Iterator<String[]> iterator = csvEntries.iterator();

while (iterator.hasNext()) {
    String[] row = iterator.next();
    System.out.println("field 1: " + row[0]);
}

There are more use cases described on the home page.

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