Question

Possible Duplicate:
Writing a CSV file in .net

Are there any good CSV writers for C#?

Don’t need a reader, just writer.

Answer 1

There’s not much to it, really… here’s some code I’ve used for several years:

public static class Csv
{
    public static string Escape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.Contains( QUOTE ) )
            s = s.Replace( QUOTE, ESCAPED_QUOTE );

        if ( s.IndexOfAny( CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED ) > -1 )
            s = QUOTE + s + QUOTE;

        return s;
    }

    public static string Unescape( string s )
    {
        if ( s.StartsWith( QUOTE ) && s.EndsWith( QUOTE ) )
        {
            s = s.Substring( 1, s.Length - 2 );

            if ( s.Contains( ESCAPED_QUOTE ) )
                s = s.Replace( ESCAPED_QUOTE, QUOTE );
        }

        return s;
    }


    private const string QUOTE = "\"";
    private const string ESCAPED_QUOTE = "\"\"";
    private static char[] CHARACTERS_THAT_MUST_BE_QUOTED = { ',', '"', '\n' };
}

You can use the Escape method to ensure that values are properly quoted. I use this class in conjunction with a simple reader, but you said you don’t need that…

Update It’s simple, but there is more to it than string.Join. However, you can still get away with something pretty simple, if you have an array of values (and are using C# 3+):

string.Join(",", values.Select(Csv.Escape));