A lite CSV reader and writer in C#, without any heavy dependency.

Parsing CSV files may sound like an easy task, but in reality it is not that trivial.

• Using String.Split() is fast, but it cannot handle quoting notation and eascaping.

• Using Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO is very good, but it's dependent on Windows platform.

If you wanna read/write CSV file in Mono/Unity cross-platform project, LiteCsvParser is the right choice.

You will need only the file "LiteCsvParser.cs", copy & ad it into your own project.

You can also git clone this project, use MonDevelop or VisualStudio to open the project to build a demo executable.

• VisualStudio
• Mono
• Unity

See dependency:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;

Read & write all data grid:

using LiteCsvParser;

List<List<string>> dataGrid = CsvFileReader.ReadAll("test.csv", Encoding.GetEncoding("gbk"));

// TODO: deal with data grid
foreach(var row in dataGrid) {
	foreach(var cell in row) {
		Console.Write("\t\t" + cell);
	}
	Console.Write("\n");
}

CsvFileWriter.WriteAll(dataGrid, "output2.csv", Encoding.GetEncoding("gbk"));

Read row by row (if the CSV file is very large):

	List<string> row = new List<string>();
	using (var reader = new CsvFileReader("Test.csv"))
	{
		while (reader.ReadRow(row))
		{
			// TODO: Do something with columns' values
			foreach(string cell in row) {
				Console.Write("\t\t" + cell);
			}
			Console.Write("\n");
		}
	}

Write row by row:

	using (var writer = new CsvFileWriter("Test.csv"))
	{
		// Write each row of data
		for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
		{
			List<string> row = new List<string>();
			
			// TODO: Populate column values for this row
			for(int j=0; j<5; j++) {
				row.Add("" + j);
			}

			writer.WriteRow(row);
		}
	}

The source code was originally written by Jonathan Wood, from blackbetcoder.com, but not found on github.com, so I create a project in github to maintain it.

This project is published under MIT License. From Jonathan Wood: Use of this article and any related source code or other files is governed by the terms and conditions of The Code Project Open License.

Feedback and pull requests are welcome.