I'm using ToCsv() on a collection to convert it to CSV text.
None of the values have quotes around them - even when there are spaces in them.
How do I switch quotes on?
CSV fields only need to be quoted if they contain delimiters, line breaks or quotes themselves.
Related
Take this CSV file:
ID,NAME,VALUE
1,Blah,100
2,"Has space",200
3,"Ends with quotes"",300
4,""Surrounded with quotes"",300
It loads just fine in most statistical programs (R, SAS, etc.) but in Excel the third row is misinterpreted because it has two quotation marks. Escaping the last quote as \" will also not work in Excel. The only way I have found so far is to replace the one double quote with two double quotes:
ID,NAME,VALUE
1,Blah,100
2,"Has space",200
3,"Ends with quotes""",300
4,"""Surrounded with quotes""",300
But that would render the file completely useless for all other programs (R, SAS, etc.)
Is there a way to format the CSV file where strings can begin or end with the same characters as that used to surround them, such that it would work in Excel as well as commonly used statistical software?
Your second representation is the normal way to generate a CSV file and so should be easy to work with in any software. See the RFC 4180 specifications. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt
So your second example represents this data:
Obs id name value
1 1 Blah 100
2 2 Has space 200
3 3 Ends with quotes" 300
4 4 "Surrounded with quotes" 300
If you want to represent it as a delimited file where none of the values are allowed to contain the delimiter (in other words NOT as a standard CSV file) than it would look like:
id,name,value
1,Blah,100
2,Has space,200
3,Ends with quotes",300
4,"Surrounded with quotes",300
But if you want to allow the values to contain the delimiter then you need some way to distinguish embedded delimiters from real delimiters. So the standard forces values that contain the delimiter to be quoted. But once you do that you also need to also add quotes around fields that contain the quote character itself (and double the embedded quotes) to avoid making an ambiguous file. For example the quotes in the 4th observation in your first file look like they are optional quotes around a value instead of part of the value.
Many programs try to handle ambiguous situations. For example SAS does not allow values to contain embedded line breaks so you will always get four observations with your first example file.
But EXCEL allows the embedding of the end of line character(s) inside of quoted values. So in your original file the value of the second field in the third observations looks like what you would start to get if you added quotes around this value:
Ends with quotes",300
4,"Surrounded with quotes",300
So instead of 4 complete observations of three fields values in each there are only three observations and the last observation has only two field values.
This is caused by the fact that escape character for " in Excel is "": Escaping quotes and delimiters in CSV files with Excel
A quick and simple workaround that comes to mind in R is to first read the content of the csv with readLines, then replace the double (escaped) double quotes with just one double quotes, and then read.table:
read.table(
text = gsub(pattern = "\"\"", "\"", readLines("data.csv")),
sep = ",",
header = TRUE
)
I came across some surprising behavior today that doesn't seem right to me. I have a CSV file with several columns, some numeric and some text. One of my text columns contains extra spaces between some words. When I read this file into R using read.csv (or more generally read.table), it removes the extra spaces. I am not talking about leading or trailing whitespace, but spaces inside the string.
I have looked through the docs and nowhere can I find an option to turn off this behavior. Surely there must be a way to tell R to read the data as it is and not remove these spaces. Or is there?
I have a .csv file similar to this one:
id,text,value
1,'foo, bar',5
2,'foo',5
3,'foo"bar',4
It uses single quotes for text.
I would like to read it in with fread(). I tried fread('text.csv', quote = "\'"), but I get 'unused argument' error. Is it possible to read the file in somehow? Can I somehow change the default quoting character?
(Using command line tool as sed to change the single quotes to double quotes also does not work as some field contains double quotes as well.)
I have a vector of strings of length in hundreds. Unfortunately, I forgot to put quotes around each element while creating it manually. Is it possible to put these quotes by using a single command instead of doing it manually in R/RStudio?
Example string:
c(122.3.Car, 125.1.Car, 132.3.Car, 140.2.Car, 163.2.Car)
Expected output:
c("122.3.Car", "125.1.Car", "132.3.Car", "140.2.Car", "163.2.Car")
I have a huge csv file, separated by comma's and I want to do a analysis with glm in R.
In one column there exists data with a comma implied, something like: bla,blabla
When reading the file in R with read.csv.sql there comes a error-message:
RS-DBI driver: (RS_sqlite_import: ./agp.csv line 47612 expected 37 columns of data but found 38)
This is due to the 'extra' comma in some of the data, not the whole column has an extra column.
How can I fix this? I want to remove this extra superfluous comma.
Thanks for the reaction,
André
The CSV format is very simple and can easily be hand edited. In order to include a comma in a value, you must surround the value with quotes quotes. Try this: "bla,blabla". If that data happens to contain any quotes, eg. blah,"thequotedblah",blah, those quotes need to be escaped with another quote, like this: "blah,""thequotedblah"",blah".
Although there is no official standard around it, there isn't much to the CSV format. Wikipedia has a great CSV reference that I have personally used to implement CSV support in applications. Spend 5-10 minutes reading it and you'll know everything you ever need to know to manually create/read/repair CSV data.
Is it just this one line that contains a non-quoted comma - or are there several such lines? Editing the .csv with an editor that can handle large files (e.g. Ultraedit) to sanitize that one record would certainly help. Asaph's suggestion of quoting is also a good 'un.