Question

I’m trying to parse csv files from google trends, but there doesn’t appear to be any delimiter between columns? Is there any way to go about getting this working so I can get data separated into columns after parsing, or is the best that I can do to just have each row in one column.

I’ve tried numerous csv readers:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx
http://www.stellman-greene.com/CSVReader/

I could try to substring out the data in each row, but that seems like a very poor solution.

Example csv file from google trends:
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=stackoverflow&date=all&geo=all&graph=all_csv&sort=0&sa=N

Anyone got any ideas?

Answer 1

It seems to me the columns are delimited with tabs (U+0009), aren’t they? Just do

using (var reader = new StreamReader(@"trends.csv", true))
{
    string line;
    while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
    {
        var items = line.Split('\t');
        if (items.Length == 3) // recognizing the header etc. left as an exercise for the reader
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Date: {0}, value = {1}, error = {2}", items[0], items[1], items[2]);
        }
    }
}