Comment escape comma and double quote at same time for CSV fichier?

[ForumBot]

I am writing a Java app to export data from Oracle to csv file

Unfortunately the content of data may quite tricky. Still comma is the deliminator, but some data on a row could be like this:

```
| ID | FN | LN | AGE | COMMENT |
|----------------------------------------------------------------|
| 123 | John | Smith | 39 | I said "Hey, I am 5'10"." |
|----------------------------------------------------------------|

```

so this is one of the string on the `comment` column:

>


I said "Hey, I am 5'10"."

No kidding, I need to show above comment without compromise in excel or open office from a CSV file generated by Java, and of course cannot mess up other regular escaping situation(i.e. regular double quotes, and regular comma within a tuple). I know regular expression is powerful but how can we achieve the goal with such complicated situation?

[ForumBot]

There are several libraries. Here are two examples:

## [❐ Apache Commons Lang](http://commons.apache.org/lang/)

[Apache Commons Lang](http://commons.apache.org/lang/) includes a special class to escape or unescape strings (CSV, EcmaScript, HTML, Java, Json, XML): [**`org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils`**](http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/javadocs/api-release/org/apache/commons/lang3/StringEscapeUtils.html).

-

*Escape* to CSV

```
String escaped = StringEscapeUtils
.escapeCsv("I said \"Hey, I am 5'10\".\""); // I said "Hey, I am 5'10"."

System.out.println(escaped); // "I said ""Hey, I am 5'10""."""

```

-

*Unescape* from CSV

```
String unescaped = StringEscapeUtils
.unescapeCsv("\"I said \"\"Hey, I am 5'10\"\".\"\"\""); // "I said ""Hey, I am 5'10""."""

System.out.println(unescaped); // I said "Hey, I am 5'10"."

```

* *You can download it from* [here](http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Ca%3A%22commons-lang3%22).

## [❐ OpenCSV](http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/)

If you use [**OpenCSV**](http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/), you will not need to worry about escape or unescape, only for write or read the content.

-

Writing file:

```
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("awesomefile.csv");
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "UTF-8");
CSVWriter writer = new CSVWriter(osw);
...
String[] row = {
"123",
"John",
"Smith",
"39",
"I said \"Hey, I am 5'10\".\""
};
writer.writeNext(row);
...
writer.close();
osw.close();
os.close();

```

-

Reading file:

```
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("awesomefile.csv");
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF-8");
CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(isr);

for (String[] row; (row = reader.readNext()) != null;) {
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(row));
}

reader.close();
isr.close();
fis.close();

```

* *You can download it from* [here](http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Cg%3A%22com.opencsv%22).