Parsing txt file which has delimiters as part of column value using opencsv reader

Question

I have a tab delimited text file which I want to parse using openscsv and upload to a database. I used CSVReader() to parse the file. The problem is, some column values have tabs within. For instance, a column ends with a tab, and then it has another tab which is used for separating it from the next column.

I'm having trouble in parsing this file. How do I avoid delimiters which are as part of the value?

This is the file I'm trying to parse. Each line has 2 columns and there are 5 rows in total. The first row is the header. However, when I parse it using the following code, I get only 3 rows:

CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader("input.txt"), '\t');
String[] nextLine;
int cnt = 0;
while ((nextLine = reader.readNext()) != null) {
    if (nextLine != null) {
        cnt++;
        System.out.println("Length of row "+cnt+" = "+nextLine.length);
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(nextLine));
    }
}

******** Update ********

Doing a normal readline such as below prints 5 lines:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("input.txt"));
int lines = 0;
while(br.readLine() != null){
    lines++;
}
System.out.println(lines);

Answer 1

1. Put quotes on your data - here is a modified unit test from CSVReaderTest that shows quotes will work:

    @Test public void testSkippingLinesWithDifferentEscape() throws IOException { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(CSVParser.INITIAL_READ_SIZE); sb.append("Skip this line?t with tab").append("\\n"); // should skip this sb.append("And this line too").append("\\n"); // and this sb.append("a\\t'b\\tb\\tb'\\t'c'").append("\\n"); // single quoted elements CSVReader c = new CSVReader(new StringReader(sb.toString()), '\\t', '\\'', '?', 2); String[] nextLine = c.readNext(); assertEquals(3, nextLine.length); assertEquals("a", nextLine[0]); assertEquals("b\\tb\\tb", nextLine[1]); assertEquals("c", nextLine[2]); } 

If that does not work please post some of the lines from your input.txt. When I click on the link it takes me to some website trying to sell me a dropbox clone.