Write CSV with text in quotes, but numerical values without quotes

Vote count:

0

Using OpenCSV, I'm trying to write a CSV file in which

• Text values are surrounded by " quotes (as they should be, because they might contain the delimiter character , comma).


• Numerical values are not surrounded by quotes (because they should be treated as numbers, not as strings, by the program that will eventually read the CSV file).

Example desired output:

"Header 1","Header 2","Header 3"
123.4,234.6,999.8
456456.32,1222.4,2222.2

Attempted solution:

My best attempt so far is:

CSVWriter csvWriter = new CSVWriter(new FileWriter(csvFile),',','\0');

where the quote char is set to '\0' i.e. the empty char (and the delimiter is left to be , as usual).

This puts no quotes around any values. To make up for the lack of " quotes around the text values, I "manually" prepend and append a litteral quote "\"" to each text value (this is quite manageable, because my headers are really only the only things that have text in them).

    for (int i=0;i<headers.length;++i) {
        headers[i] = "\"" + headers[i] + "\"";
    }

Actual output:

I really thought this would nail it, but the output looks like this:

""Header 1"",""Header 2"",""Header 3""
123.4,234.6,999.8
456456.32,1222.4,2222.2

Text values are enclosed in double quotes ""!

asked 2 mins ago

Jean-François Corbett

16.1k