AutoHotkey Community

[Joshua]

Can anyone help me with this,
I'm using .csv array to read an excel file but one of the columns contains text with multiple commas. I do not want to seperate based on these commas, is there a way to seperate based on excel columns only?

Example:

Excel column A: 1235
Excel column B: last name, first name, DOB
Excel column C: class

I need to have each column read into it's own variable, including all of column B.

Thanks in advance,
Joshua

[Helpy]

Not too sure of what you mean, but in CSV, if a field has special chars like double quotes, commas or newlines, you have to put double quotes around it (and double the double quotes inside).

HTH.

[Dippy46]

@ Joshua,

Well, if you look at the csv produced by Excel, as Helpy rightly says, you'll find fields containg commas are enclosed in quotes.

This can of course be used to our advantage. So while no-one has yet popped out of the woodwork with a ReGex solution, we'll use old fashioned methods

Sample csv generated by excel:

123,"one,two",5897,"john,doe",999,
5235,"four,five,six",2567,"fred,the,bear",277,183
32,"one,two,three,four","ted,smith",56,,

[FeiVictas]

This is actually quite simple. AHK has the capability to read .csv exactly as Excel writes them (including support for literal quotes, commas, etc). Simply specify CSV as the delimiter in a parsing loop.