Question

Suppose I have many objects, each has a UID property and an array of credit card NOs card_nos.

I want to dump the information to CVS(Excel) file in a fashion that cells with same UID are merged to form a single one. One UID spans as many rows as the number of credit cards it has, but at least one.

Here is an example, User 001 has 3 cards, so the cvs file will look like the following:

+-------------+
| UID | Card# |
--------------+
|     | Card1 |
      --------+
| 001 | Card2 |
      --------+
|     | Card3 |
--------------+

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can’t create a CSV file that does this – the CSV format doesn’t support it.

Try it the other way and you’ll see: create a worksheet with the formatting as you describe and save it as CSV. You’ll get a warning starting with

"[whatever you called it/] may contain features that are not compatible with CSV (Comma delimited)...."

Accept the limitation and you’ll get a CSV file. Mine looked like this:

UID,Card#
001,Card1
,Card2
,Card3

… which, when I reloaded it into Excel had indeed lost the merge as I expected:

+------+-------+
| UID  | Card# |
+------+-------+
| 1    | Card1 |
+------+-------+
|      | Card2 |
+------+-------+
|      | Card3 |
+------+-------+

You can, however, get there with HTML, if it makes sense otherwise in your app – the following HTML will load with a merged UID cell as described (note the use of the “rowspan” attribute):

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <td>UID</td>
      <td>Card#</td>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td rowspan="3">001</td>
        <td>Card1</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>Card2</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>Card3</td>
      </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>