Question

I am currently developing an application in C# where I need to write a tab separated CSV file from the data that it retrieves from a MySQL Database. The database retrieval works fine.

The problem that I am having is writing the file. Between each variable that I am writing I am using the \t which I thought put a tab into the csv, therefore when opening in excel each variable will be in its own cell.

However for some reason it is not doing this it just writes the whole line as one long string. Below is an example of the code that I am code that I have written:

while (reader.Read())
{
    int bankID = reader.GetInt16("ban_bankID");
    int userID = reader.GetInt16("ban_userID");
    string bankUsername = reader.GetString("ban_username");
    string accountName = reader.GetString("ban_accountName");
    string accountType = reader.GetString("ban_accountType");
    decimal overdraft = reader.GetDecimal("ban_overdraft");
    char defaultAccount = reader.GetChar("ban_defaultAccount");

    string line = bankID + "\t" + userID + "\t" + bankUsername + "\t" + accountName + "\t"
              + accountType + "\t" + overdraft + "\t" + defaultAccount + "\n";

    tw.WriteLine(line);

Thanks for your help with this problem.

Answer 1

The format is correct, a CSV expects the file to be COMMA Separated. When saving a Tab delimited file, typically just a txt extension is used (or some people save as .tsv) etc.

If you look at the Save As options in excel the option is Text (Tab Delimited) .txt

If I open the output generated by your sample code (stubbing in the data) everything loads in to Excel 2007 as you would expect.