CSV parser/reader for C#?

Question

is there a good and free implementation of CSV parser available under some liberal licence? Some counterpart of SuperCSV for Java, perhaps a port?

Not constructive? SO admins are so crazy. This is a VERY helpful question. — richard, Sep 20 '14 at 03:32

score 71 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 24 '15 at 02:32

71

FileHelpers Open Source Library.

edited Jul 24 '15 at 02:32

Nathan Tuggy

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answered May 25 '09 at 14:04

Keltex

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FileHelpers (for CSV at least) requires that you "define a class that maps to the record in the source (file)", "you must declare a Record Mapping Class" etc. and this is not so hot. I'd like to convert CSV into a DataTable, not knowing in advance how many columns to expect. – Konrad Morawski Jul 07 '11 at 13:00

score 53 · Answer 2 · answered May 25 '09 at 14:05

53

There's a nice implementation on CodeProject:

To give more down to earth numbers, with a 45 MB CSV file containing 145 fields and 50,000 records, the reader was processing about 30 MB/sec. So all in all, it took 1.5 seconds! The machine specs were P4 3.0 GHz, 1024 MB.

answered May 25 '09 at 14:05

Anton Gogolev

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(taking back my +1): I just broke the lumenworks Fast CSV reader on a 53Mb file. Looks like the line caching failed after 43,000 rows and scrambled the buffer. Tried the `Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParse` and it did the trick. – iCollect.it Ltd May 21 '12 at 12:55

score 12 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 26 '13 at 14:06

12

You can load a CSV file to DataTable.

Sample code -

static DataTable CsvToDataTable(string strFileName)
{
    DataTable dataTable = new DataTable("DataTable Name");

    using (OleDbConnection conn = new OleDbConnection("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OleDb.4.0; Data Source = " + Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "; Extended Properties = \"Text;HDR=YES;FMT=Delimited\""))
    {
        conn.Open();
        string strQuery = "SELECT * FROM [" + strFileName + "]";
        OleDbDataAdapter adapter = 
            new System.Data.OleDb.OleDbDataAdapter(strQuery, conn);
        adapter.Fill(dataTable);
    }
    return dataTable;
}

Make sure you compile your project to x86 processor. It doesn't work for x64.

edited Feb 26 '13 at 14:06

RB.

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answered Jun 28 '10 at 08:21

Maxim

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this worked pretty well for me since I wanted to stay with the built-in ODBC or OLEDB libraries. Btw, the following has additional code samples for both OLEDB and ODBC: http://www.csvreader.com/csv_benchmarks.php – Meringros Oct 03 '10 at 19:12
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This is not working on 64 bit, alas. – DenNukem Nov 15 '12 at 22:07
Two links that maybe useful with regards to this answer: 1. [C# Tutorial - Using The Built In OLEDB CSV Parser](http://tech.pro/tutorial/803/csharp-tutorial-using-the-built-in-oledb-csv-parser) 2. [How To Retrieve Column Schema by Using the DataReader GetSchemaTable Method and Visual C# .NET](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310107) – shawad Jul 25 '13 at 16:36

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 31 '15 at 13:30

7

try filehelpers Work amazingly well. I am using it to parse a 100 MB file every day.

edited Jul 31 '15 at 13:30

Marcos Meli

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answered May 25 '09 at 14:05

no_one

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score 4 · Answer 5 · edited Jul 31 '15 at 13:50

4

Have you tried the FileHelpers library? It's free, open source and can be used to parse CSV files.

http://www.filehelpers.net/

edited Jul 31 '15 at 13:50

Marcos Meli

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answered May 25 '09 at 14:05

JaredPar

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score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 11 '10 at 12:37

I've started using CSV Parser that is part of the CommonLibrary.NET.

It uses .NET 3.5, has an easy API, and convenient overloads/methods & lamda's for iterations.

I don't have any benchmarks for this one like above, but nice thing about this is that it's just one component of a library similar to Java Commons. So I also get a Command-line parser, Repository implementation among other things.

CSV parser/reader for C#?

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