Question

I am looking for some best practices as far as handling csv and tab delimited files.

For CSV files I am already doing some formatting if a value contains a comma or double quote but what if the value contains a new line character? Should I leave the new line intact and encase the value in double quotes + escape any double quotes within the value?

Same question for tab delimited files. I assume the answer would be very similar if not the same.

Answer 1

Usually you keep \n unaltered while exploiting the fact that the newline char will be enclosed in a " " string. This doesn’t create ambiguities but it’s really ugly if you have to take a look to the file using a normal texteditor.

But it is how you should do since you don’t escape anything inside a string in a CSV except for the double quote itself.