CSV.generate adds quotation marks to strings

Question

I am generating CSV files this way:

csv_address_book = CSV.generate do |csv|
  @users.each do |u|  
    csv << ["Add", 
            nil,
            u.name,
            u.pet,
            nil,
            u.addreess,
            ..] 

It works well, but to some strings are attached quotation marks, so instead of:

A,Cat,123,B

I am getting

A,"Cat",123,B

I am trying to get rid of this behavior, but I am losing so far... The string Cat is loaded from database and there are no quotation marks. I've tried manually remove them, like

d.pet.gsub('"', '')

But the result is the same - the quotation marks are still in the final generated CSV file.

Any tip how to get rid of it?

Answer 1

I'm not seeing the problem using some simple Ruby code to poke at CSV:

require 'csv'

['A','Cat',123,'B'].to_csv # => "A,Cat,123,B\n"

If I break down the generation CSV seems to be behaving well:

['a', 'b'].to_csv # => "a,b\n"
['a b'].to_csv # => "a b\n"
['a,b'].to_csv # => "\"a,b\"\n"
['"a b"'].to_csv # => "\"\"\"a b\"\"\"\n"

Recreating your code using generate and a block:

csv_string = CSV.generate do |csv|
  csv << ['A','Cat',123,'B']
  csv << ['a', 'b']
  csv << ['a b']
  csv << ['a,b']
  csv << ['"a b"']
end

csv_string
# => "A,Cat,123,B\na,b\na b\n\"a,b\"\n\"\"\"a b\"\"\"\n"

puts csv_string
# >> A,Cat,123,B
# >> a,b
# >> a b
# >> "a,b"
# >> """a b"""