Question

I have a web application that parse users uploaded csv files.

Some users upload csv files don’t match proper csv format mentioned here

For example:

abc,hello mahmoud,this is" description, bad

This should be

abc,hello mahmoud,"this is"" description", bad

When I used ruby fastercsv library to parse the wrong csv, it fails. However, it success when I open the file by excel or openoffice.

Is there any ruby library can reformat the csv text to put it in a proper format?

Answer 1

From the docs:

What you don‘t want to do is feed FasterCSV invalid CSV. Because of
the way the CSV format works, it‘s common for a parser to need to read
until the end of the file to be sure a field is invalid. This eats a
lot of time and memory.

Luckily, when working with invalid CSV, Ruby‘s built-in methods will
almost always be superior in every way. For example, parsing
non-quoted fields is as easy as:

data.split(“,”)

This would give you an array. If you really want valid CSV (f.e. because you rescued the MalformedCSVError) then there is… fasterCSV!

require 'csv'
str= %q{abc,hello mahmoud,this is" description, bad}
puts str.split(',').to_csv 
#=> abc,hello mahmoud,"this is"" description", bad