Software Development

Parse CSV file using Apache Commons CSV

Why use CSV files?

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Sometimes we process data in bulk by reading them from files with specific format like CSV. This article demonstrates how to parse a CSV file using Apache Commons CSV. A CSV is a file format wherein values are comma-separated. Thus, CSV or comma-separated values.

Sample CSV file to read

To keep things really simple, we’ll use a small CSV file with 4 headers and 4 rows. The first row contains the header name for each column.

View CSV file using LibreOffice Calc

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Here is the content of our CSV file using LibreOffice Calc

commons-csv-2015-12-08_232455

View CSV file using text editor

Here is the content of our CSV file using any text editor. In this case, we used gedit.

commons-csv-screenshot_from_2015-12-08_232538

The Codes

The following codes is from a class with only this method. Since we have headers, we need to use .withHeader() on CSVFormat.EXCEL to use the parse(Reader) method.

Download the Codes

https://github.com/Turreta/java-apache-commons-csv-example

We are using JUnit 4.12, commons-csv 1.2, and Java 8. Please see pom.xml.

Convert String to a Reader object

For simpler tests, you may want to avoid using actual CSV files. Instead, a String containing the CSV data can be converted to a Reader object and passed to the parse(Reader) method.

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