Escaping quotes when reading a CSV file?

gjewett

I am importing a CSV file that is generated by a Point of Sale application. Unfortunately the CSV they output does not have properly escaped quotes, so a line often looks like this:

1010, "Item Description of 14" tall tree", "Blue", $10.00, 3

The extra quote in the item description is causing problems when reading this data with PHP. There are thousands of items in the database so going through and manually removing the quotes from each item description is not a great option.

Is there a way to use regular expressions or something like that to go through the whole CSV file and escape all of the extra quotes?

Thanks!

NogDog

Maybe....

$csv = preg_replace('/(?<!,)"(?!,)/', '""', $csv);

The idea here is to double up any double quote that is not immediately preceded or followed by a comma. This may need to be altered if your example is accurate and there is a space after each comma.

gjewett

Works flawlessly (you were right, my example was wrong, no spaces after commas). Thanks very much for your help. Time for me to spend a day learning to use regular expressions!

NogDog

gjewett;10934617 wrote:
Works flawlessly (you were right, my example was wrong, no spaces after commas). Thanks very much for your help. Time for me to spend a day learning to use regular expressions!

If you master it in a day, I'll be impressed. 🙂