CSV : Java Glossary

CSV

comma separated value. A file of ASCII fields separated by commas. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and SQL can often import some variant on this format.

apple,"wild cherry",peach
pear,plum,"apricot"
mango,payaya,guava
"orange, Valencia",  lemon, lime
"""extra virgin"" olive", palm, date

Usually fields containing embedded spaces or commas are contained in " marks, but there are other conventions. Quotes (") inside quoted fields are doubled. Europeans often use ; and Perl aficionados use tab to separate fields instead of commas. Sybase SQL import uses ' instead of ".

I wrote CSVReader and CSVWriter which are available with complete Java source. They are full featured and configurable. You can read, write, sort, align, pack, etc. with the library or with the sample utilities.

For simple key=value you might use the built-in Properties mechanism instead. Unfortunately, it has a complex system of encoding awkward characters incompatible with CSV.

Creativyst csv
CSV Objects
CSV Reader in C#
CSV-JDBC
CSVReader in Java
CSVReader.com
DataPipeline
H2 csv
JSefa csv
Open CSV
Ostermiller CSV
Ricebridge

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