So I have a script in PHP that creates tab separated CSV output.
I have a button in my HTML that works like so:
Export Data
Ideally I want the user to open this CSV file in Excel.
The issue I have here is with tab separated CSVs, the file extension, and how Excel handles all of this. For example:
download="export.csv"
Results in the Browser asking me to open this in Excel (wanted behaviour), but then once in Excel none of the columns are respected as they are tab separated (not comma separated, which Excel is obviously expecting).
download="export.xls"
Results in the Browser asking me to open this in Excel (again, wanted behaviour), but then Excel complains that the file extension and the contents do not match and gives the user a warning. If the user goes past this warning the data displays as expected, but I could do without the warning.
download="export.txt"
Results in the Browser downloading the file as a text file. Once imported into Excel, the columns are respected, but I could do with this being thought of as an Excel file like CSV files are.
download="export.tsv"
Results in the Browser downloading the file, but as this extension isnt recognized, it will need to be imported into Excel manually, which isn't what I am after. Infact, even though TSV is the most correct file extension for tab separated verse, the TXT extension seems to work more smoothly.
I am unable to set file associations on the end users machine, and I would like to avoid going down the "export your data as an actual XLXS file" route if at all possible. I would prefer to use tab separated CSVs over comma separated CSVs because the exported data contains lots of commas naturally.
EDIT:
So as per Ron Rosenfeld suggested I tried outputting a comma separated CSV file with quotes around the data - and the file loads into Excel, with columns preserved - however the quotes appear on every piece of data in every column that uses quotes.
Is it possible to not have the quotes appear?
Ideally I would prefer to have the content tab separated, but at this stage anything that allows me to open a CSV file from a browser into Excel would be great.
I want a way to download a tab separated CSV file from a browser to Excel with as little fuss as possible. How can this be achieved?
The difference between the CSV and TSV files are - as long as the creator followed some rules, that: CSV file will have comma separated values and a TSV file will have tab separated values.
For TXT files, there is no formatting specified.
CSV files are comma-delimited, so you have to use this:
sep=,
And TSV files are tab-delimited, so you have to use this:
sep=\t
If you have MS Excel installed on your computer, CSV files are closely associated with Excel.
Please, look at this post to find out what the use of sep=; for UTF-8 and UTF-16LE leads to.
It's very important to properly output UTF-8 and UTF-16LE CSV files in PHP.
So THIS POST will be informative and useful for you.
CSV means "comma separated values", so the default separator is a ,.
To change that separator to a tab, put
sep=\t
as the first line in your .csv-file (yes, you can still name it .csv). That tells excel what the delimiter character should be.
Note, that if you open the .csv with an actual text editor, it should read like
sep= (an actual tabulator character here, it's just not visible...)
This feature is not officially defined in the .csv RFC 4180, so if it works with any software other than Excel depends on that software's implementation.
I have done this before. A painful experience, which I rather not relive. but since you asked (and bountied).
Make sure your http-headers read: Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Make ; your separator
Don't enclose by " (This is a magic I have yet to understand).
Fingers crossed
I have a file that is extracted from a system in a format over which I have no control. It is CSV (UTF-8) and there is a column that contains carriage returns (I'm not sure exactly what they are, but they were originally uploaded from an Excel file with information in the same column but with CTRL+ENTER to change line in the column).
Excel interprets them and changes line, so it creates a new line that does not fit with the headers and is not handled properly when the file is saved as a .csv file again. The text is within text delimiters ", so I'm guessing there should be a way to specify the handling of the text inside this delimiter.
I know there's probably no easy way to do that, but is there some VBA code I could use to handle this?
Here is an exemple of what it looks like when it is saved as a csv :
HEADER, GoalLibraryEntry, GUID, PARENT_GUID, LOCALE name, etc.
ADD, GoalLibraryEntry, 710103, 710100, en_US, "Test:,,,,,,,
a) Test1,,,,,,,,,,,
b) Test2,,,,,,,,,,,
c) Blabla,,,,,,,,,,,
d) Blablabla,,,,,,,,,,
e) Test5",,,,,,,,,,,
My problem is very similar to this one : Generating CSV file for Excel, how to have a newline inside a value
However, I've tried saving in ANSI before opening it in Excel without success. I also tried to add UTF-8 BOM at the start, but Excel does not seem to interpret it in any way.
What you're most likely seeing is multiline cells made when the user does a alt-enter on the keyboard.
The function you're looking for is clean (eg.) which you could use in VBA.
=clean(a1)
This removes non-printable characters from a cell.
I'm working on a feature to export search results to a CSV file to be opened in Excel. One of the fields is a free-text field, which may contain line breaks, commas, quotations, etc. In order to counteract this, I have wrapped the field in double quotes (").
However, when I import the data into Excel 2007, set the appropriate delimiter, and set the text qualifier to double quote, the line breaks are still creating new records at the line breaks, where I would expect to see the entire text field in a single cell.
I've also tried replacing CR/LF (\r\n) with just CR (\r), and again with just LF (\n), but no luck.
Has anyone else encountered this behavior, and if so, how did you fix it?
TIA,
-J
EDIT:
Here's a quick file I wrote by hand to duplicate the problem.
ID,Name,Description
"12345","Smith, Joe","Hey.
My name is Joe."
When I import this into Excel 2007, I end up with a header row, and two records. Note that the comma in "Smith, Joe" is being handled properly. It's just the line breaks that are causing problems.
Excel (at least in Office 2007 on XP) can behave differently depending on whether a CSV file is imported by opening it from the File->Open menu or by double-clicking on the file in Explorer.
I have a CSV file that is in UTF-8 encoding and contains newlines in some cells. If I open this file from Excel's File->Open menu, the "import CSV" wizard pops up and the file cannot be correctly imported: the newlines start a new row even when quoted. If I open this file by double-clicking on it in an Explorer window, then it opens correctly without the intervention of the wizard.
None of the suggested solutions worked for me.
What actually works (with any encoding):
Copy/paste the data from the csv-file (open in a text editor), then perform "text to columns" --> data gets transformed incorrectly.
The next stap is to go to the nearest empty column or empty worksheet and copy/paste again (same thing what you already have in your clipboard) --> automagically works now.
If you are doing this manually, download LibreOffice and use LibreOffice Calc to import your CSV. It does a much better job of stuff like this than any version of Excel I've tried, and it can save to XLS or XLSX as required if you need to transfer to Excel afterwards.
But if you're stuck with Excel and need a better fix, there seems to be a way. It seems to be locale dependent (which seems idiotic, in my humble opinion). I don't have Excel 2007, but I have Excel 2010, and the example given:
ID,Name,Description
"12345","Smith, Joe","Hey.
My name is Joe."
doesn't work. I wrote it in Notepad and chose Save as..., and next to the Save button you can choose the encoding. I chose UTF-8 as suggested, but with no luck. Changing the commas to semicolons worked for me, though. I didn't change anything else, and it just worked. So I changed the example to look like this, and chose the UTF-8 encoding when saving in Notepad:
ID;Name;Description
"12345";"Smith, Joe";"Hey.
My name is Joe."
But there's a catch! The only way it works is if you double-click the CSV file to open it in Excel. If I try to import data from text and chose this CSV, then it still fails on quoted newlines.
But there's another catch! The working field separator (comma in the original example, semicolon in my case) seems to depend on the system's Regional Settings (set under Control Panel -> Region and Language). In Norway, comma is the decimal separator. Excel seems to avoid this character and prefer a semicolon instead. I have access to another computer set to UK English locale, and on that computer, the first example with a comma separator works fine (only on doubleclick), and the one with semicolon actually fails! So much for interoperability. If you want to publish this CSV online and users may have Excel, I guess you have to publish both versions and suggest that people check which file gives the correct number of rows.
So all the details that I've been able to gather to get this to work are:
The file must be saved as UTF-8 with a BOM, which is what Notepad does when you chose UTF-8. I tried UTF-8 without BOM (can be switched easily in Notepad++), but then double-clicking the document fails.
You must use a comma or a semicolon separator, but not the one that is the decimal separator in your Regional Settings. Perhaps other characters work, but I don't know which.
You must quote fields that contain a newline with the " character.
I've used Windows line-endings (\r\n) both in the text field and as a record separator, that works.
You must double-click the file to open it, importing data from text doesn't work.
Hope this helps someone.
I have finally found the problem!
It turns out that we were writing the file using Unicode encoding, rather than ASCII or UTF-8. Changing the encoding on the FileStream seems to solve the problem.
Thanks everyone for all your suggestions!
Use Google Sheets and import the CSV file.
Then you can export that to use in Excel
Short Answer
Remove the newline/linefeed characters (\n with Notepad++). Excel will still recognise the carriage return character (\r) to separate records.
Long Answer
As mentioned newline characters are supported inside CSV fields but Excel doesn't always handle them gracefully. I faced a similar issue with a third party CSV that possibly had encoding issues but didn't improve with encoding changes.
What worked for me was removing all newline characters (\n). This has the effect of collapsing fields to a single record assuming that your records are separated by the combination of a carriage return and a newline (CR/LF). Excel will then properly import the file and recognise new records by the carriage return.
Obviously a cleaner solution is to first replace the real newlines (\r\n) with a temporary character combination, replacing the newlines (\n) with your seperating character of choice (e.g. comma in a semicolon file) and then replacing the temporary characters with proper newlines again.
If the field contains a leading space, Excel ignores the double quote as a text qualifier. The solution is to eliminate leading spaces between the comma (field separator) and double-quote. For example:
Broken:
Name,Title,Description
"John", "Mr.", "My detailed description"
Working:
Name,Title,Description
"John","Mr.","My detailed description"
If anyone stumbling across this thread and is looking for a definitive answer here goes (credit to the person mentioning LibreOffice:
1) Install LibreOffice
2) Open Calc and import file
3) My txt file had the fields separated by , and character fields enclosed in "
4) save as ODS file
5) Open ODS file in Excel
6) Save as .xls(x)
7) Done.
8) This worked perfectly for me and saved me BIGTIME!
+1 on J Ashley's comment. I ran into this problem also. It turns out that Excel requires:
A newline character("\n") in the quoted string
A carriage return and newline between each row.
E.g.
"Test", "Multiline item\n
multiline item"\r\n
"Test2", "Multiline item\n
multiline item"\r\n
I used notepad ++ to delimit each row properly and to only use newlines in the string. Discovered this by creating multiline entries in a blank excel doc and opening the csv in notepad ++.
Overview
Almost 10 years after the original post, Excel hasn't improved in importing CSV files. However, I found that it is much better in importing HTML tables. So, one can use Python to convert CSV to HTML and then import the resulting HTML to Excel.
The advantages of this approach are: (a) it works reliably, (b) you don't need to send your data to a third party service (e.g. Google sheets), (c) no extra "fat" installations required (LibreOffice, Numbers etc.) for most users, (d) higher level than meddling with CR/LF characters and BOM markers, (e) no need to fiddle with locale settings.
Steps
The following steps can be run on any bash-like shell as long as Python 3 is installed. Although Python can be used to directly read CSV, csvkit is used to do an intermediate conversion to JSON. This allows us to avoid having to deal with CSV intricacies in our Python code.
First, save the following script as json2html.py. The script reads a JSON file from stdin and dumps it as an HTML table:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys, json, html
if __name__ == '__main__':
header_emitted = False
make_th = lambda s: "<th>%s</th>" % (html.escape(s if s else ""))
make_td = lambda s: "<td>%s</td>" % (html.escape(s if s else ""))
make_tr = lambda l, make_cell: "<tr>%s</tr>" % ( "".join([make_cell(v) for v in l]) )
print("<html><body>\n<table>")
for line in json.load(sys.stdin):
lk, lv = zip(*line.items())
if not header_emitted:
print(make_tr(lk, make_th))
header_emitted = True
print(make_tr(lv, make_td))
print("</table\n</body></html>")
Then, install csvkit in a virtual environment and use csvjson to feed the input file to our script. It is a good idea to disable cell type guessing with the -I argument:
$ virtualenv -p python3 pyenv
$ . ./pyenv/bin/activate
$ pip install csvkit
$ csvjson -I input.csv | python3 json2html.py > output.html
Now output.html can be imported in Excel. Line breaks in cells will have been preserved.
Optionally, you may want to cleanup your Python virtual environment:
$ deactivate
$ rm -rf pyenv
Multiline CSV can be imported easily in Excel versions with Power Query using following steps (tested in Excel 365 version 2207):
Go to Data-tab
Click "From Text/CSV" on the ribbon
Select file and click Import
Click "Transform Data" to open Power Query Editor
Click "Data source settings" on the Power Query Editor ribbon
Click "Change Source"
Select "Ignore quoted line breaks" from the "Line breaks" dropdown.
Click OK -> Close -> Close & Load
Paste into Notepad++, select Encoding > Encode in ANSI, copy all again and paste into Excel :)
I had a similar problem. I had some twitter data in MySQL. The data had Line feed( LF or \n) with in the data. I had a requirement of exporting the MySQL data into excel. The LF was messing up my import of csv file. So I did the following -
1. From MySQL exported to CSV with Record separator as CRLF
2. Opened the data in notepad++
3. Replaced CRLF (\r\n) with some string I am not expecting in the Data. I used ###~###! as replacement of CRLF
4. Replaced LF (\n) with Space
5. Replaced ###~###! with \r\n, so my record separator are back.
6. Saved and then imported into Excel
NOTE- While replacing CRLF or LF dont forget to Check Excended (\n,\r,\t... Checkbox [look at the left hand bottom of the Dialog Box)
My experience with Excel 2010 on WinXP with French regional settings
the separator of your imported csv must correspond to the list separator of your regional settings (; in my case)
you must double click on the file from the explorer. don't open it from Excel
On MacOS try using Numbers
If you have access to Mac OS I have found that the Apple spreadsheet Numbers does a good job of unpicking a complex multi-line CSV file that Excel could not handle. Just open the .csv with Numbers and then export to Excel.
Excel is incredibly broken when dealing with CSVs. LibreOffice does a much better job. So, I found out that:
The file must be encoded in UTF-8 with BOM, so consider this for all the points below
The best result, by far, is achieved by opening it from File Explorer
If you open it from within Excel there are two possible outcomes:
If it has only ASCII characters, it will most likely work
If it has non-ASCII characters, it will mess your line breaks
It seems to be heavily dependent on the decimal separator configured in the
OS's regional settings, so you have to select the right one
I would bet that it may also behave differently depending on OS and
Office version
This is for Excel 2016:
Just had the same problem with line breaks inside a csv file with the Excel Wizard.
Afterwards I was trying it with the "New Query" Feature:
Data -> New Query -> From File -> From CSV -> Choose the File -> Import -> Load
It was working perfectly and a very quick workaround for all of you that have the same problem.
With Excel 2019 I had a similar problem when working with CSV files via Data -> Import from text file / CSV. Once the connection is made and the data is synced, it reported xx error(s) because of shifted columns caused by the line breaks.
I managed to solve this by
Edit the query (Query -> Edit)
This opens the Power Query Editor
Go to Start -> Advanced Editor
This opens the query in text format, where line #2 had an instruction like
Source = Csv.Document(File.Contents("my.csv"),[Delimiter=",", .... , QuoteStyle=QuoteStyle.None]),
Change QuoteStyle.None to QuoteStyle.Csv
Click Finish
Apply & close
Documentation found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/csv-document
NB. I since found where this is "hidden" in the UI. In the Power Query-editor, click Data source settings, Change source (bottom left), and the Line breaks combo should say Ignore line breaks between quotes.
NB2. Working from Dutch Excel here so my above-mentioned translations of button captions etc. may be a little off.
What just worked for me, importing into Excel directly provided that the import is done as a text format instead as csv format.
M/
just create a new sheet with cells with linebreak, save it to csv then open it with an editor that can show the end of line characters (like notepad++). By doing that you will notice that a linebreak in a cell is coded with LF while a "real" end of line is code with CR LF. Voilà, now you know how to generate a "correct" csv file for excel.
I also had this problem: ie., csv files (comma delimited, double quote delimited strings) with LF in quoted strings. These were downloaded Square files. I did a data import but instead of importing as text files, imported as "from HTML". This time it ignored the LF's in the quoted strings.
This worked on Mac, using csv and opening the file in Excel.
Using python to write the csv file.
data= '"first line of cell a1\r 2nd line in cell a1\r 3rd line in cell a1","cell b1","1st line in cell c1\r 2nd line in cell c1"\n"first line in cell a2"\n'
file.write(data)
In my case opening CSV in notepad++ and adding SEP="," as the first line allows me open CSV with line breaks and utf-8 in Excel without issues
Replace the separator with TAB(\t) instead of comma(,).
Then open the file in your editor (Notepad etc.), copy the content from there, then paste it in the Excel file.
It appears that this is much easier in more recent versions of Excel:
Go to "Data" -> "Get Data (Power Query)"
In the dialogue that opens, select "Text / CSV" on the right
Search for the file and then click "Next" and follow the recommendations (in my case, Excel now correctly realized it's UTF8 and that cells were separated by ";" and the text identifier were double quotes (")
You're done!
This took a little moment to load but afterwards I had an auto-formatted table that looked really nice and that did understand that multi-line entries were still part of the same entry.
If you want the multi-lines to show correctly, simply format the cells and under "Alignment", click the checkbox for "Wrap text". That should solve the last of your issues.
Good luck! ;-)