Question

I have a .csv file I’d like to modify. Here is the format of the file:

  Id, UTMGridEast, UTMGridNorth, LocDate, LocTime, Species

What I have done already is create an arraylist of all these values, but what I would like to do is create an arraylist of all the values and each line in the dataset is another array. This is because I need to edit the fields UTMGridEast and UTMGridNorth and then reinsert them into the arraylist.

My GUI consists of just two buttons, here is my code so far:

public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
    private string _filename;

    private string[] _splitValues;

    public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

private void btnLoad_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        // Configure open file dialog box
        Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog dlg = new Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog();
        dlg.FileName = "Dataset"; // Default file name
        dlg.DefaultExt = ".txt"; // Default file extension
        dlg.Filter = "Commar Seperated Values (.csv)|*.csv" ; // Filter files by extension 

        // Show open file dialog box
        Nullable<bool> result = dlg.ShowDialog();

        // Process open file dialog box results 
        if (result == true)
        {
            // Open document 
            _filename = dlg.FileName;
            txtFilePath.Text = _filename;
        }
    }

    private void btnConvert_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        ConvertToLatLong();
    }

    private void ConvertToLatLong()
    {
        string textFile = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(_filename);

        foreach (var value in textFile)
        {
            _splitValues = textFile.Split(',');
            Console.WriteLine("Split values: " + _splitValues[value]); 
        }

    }
}

Answer 1

Firstly I would split the text based on NewLine, as to get the individual lines, and then based on the field seperator.

something like

List<string> lines = new List<string>(textFile.Split(new[] { Environment.NewLine }, StringSplitOptions.None));
for (int iLine = 0; iLine < lines.Count; iLine++)
{
    List<string> values = new List<string>(lines[iLine].Split(new[] {","}, StringSplitOptions.None));
        for (int iValue = 0; iValue < values.Count; iValue++)
            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Line {0} Value {1} : {2}", iLine, iValue, values[iValue]));
}

But as I have always said, rolling your own CSV parser is very difficult.

Have a look at Comma-separated values

Specifically at the section Basic rules and examples

What I would recomend is C# Tutorial – Using The Built In OLEDB CSV Parser