CSV application support

The comma-separated values file format is a very simple data file format that is supported by almost all spreadsheet software such as Excel (although Excel uses the list separator of the current locale settings, which is a semicolon instead of a comma for many locales), OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric as well as many online spreadsheet services such as EditGrid and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Many database management systems support the reading and writing of CSV files.

Programming language tools

Any programming language that has input/output and string processing functionality is capable of reading and writing CSV files. The following is a list of individual programming language support for the comma-separated values format.

Data Interpretation

Many applications that import CSV will try to interpret numbers and dates in order to allow sorting or other formatting features. For example, if a CSV field contains a large integer such as "1234567890123456" then it will appear in Gnumeric as "1.2346789012346E+15" and the resulting value is less accurate. Some applications also accept a single quote-character at the beginning of numbers as a way to indicate that it should be displayed as text (typically left aligned while numbers are right aligned).

Utilities

The [http://www.ioplex.com/~miallen/libmba/dl/examples/csvprint.c csvprint] utility will reformat CSV input based on a format string. This can be useful for reordering fields or generating source code or tables as illustrated in the following example:

$ csvprint data.csv " { %0, %1, %2, "%3" }, " { 0xC0000008, 0x00060001, NT_STATUS_INVALID_HANDLE, "The handle is invalid." },

[http://csvdiff.sourceforge.net/ csvdiff] is a perl script to compare/diff two (comma) separated files with each other. The part that is different from standard diff is, that you'll get the number of the record where the difference occours and the field/column which is different. The separator can be set to the value you want it to, not just comma. Also you can to provide a third file which contains the columnnames in one(!) line separated by your separator. If you do so, columnnames are shown if a difference is found. Example: $ perl csvdiff.pl -a act.csv -e exp.csv -s ";" -c col_names.csv -k "2" -t -i Record with key "200100500" is different: Actual line 006 > 200100500;200100500;6;;;;;;000;0;2005-12-20;55 < Expected line 008 > 200100500;200100500;6;;;;;;000;0;2005-12-19;55 < Difference in field no.: 11 - field name: Dat_Rueckgabe Actual > 2005-12-20 < Expected > 2005-12-19 <

[http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html CSVed] is a freeware utility for Windows that loads a CSV file with its tabular structure and allows editing it in an efficient way.