Outputs the specified array of strings to the specified
Writer
in the format of a line for a CSV file.
"CSV" stands for
Comma Separated Values.
There is no formal specification for a CSV file, so there is significant variation in
the way different applications handle issues like the encoding of different data types and special characters.
Generally, a CSV file contains a list of records separated by line breaks, with each record consisting of a list of
field values separated by commas.
Each record in the file should contain the same number of field values, with the values at each position representing the same
type of data in all the records. In this way the file can also be divided into columns, often with the first line of the
file containing the column labels.
Columns can have different data types such as text, numeric, date / time and boolean.
A text value is often delimited with single (
'
) or double-quotes (
"
),
especially if the value contains a comma, line feed, or other special character that is significant to the syntax.
Encoding techniques for including quote characters themselves in text values vary widely.
Values of other types are generally unquoted to distinguish them from text values.
This method produces output that is readable by MS-Excel, conforming to the following rules:
- All values are considered to be of type text, except for the constants
Config.ColumnValueTrue
and Config.ColumnValueFalse
, representing the boolean values true
and false
respectively.
- All text values are enclosed in double-quotes.
- Double-quote characters contained in text values are encoded using two consecutive double-quotes (
""
).
null
values are represented as empty fields.
- The end of each record is represented by a carriage-return / line-feed (CR/LF) pair.
- Line breaks inside text values are represented by a single line feed (LF) character.