CSV Special Character

Posted on October 8, 2013 • 2 minutes • 307 words

Table of contents

Unicode

Separate CSV data with a special character (example: thorn þ).

Google DFP (Double-click for Publishers) uses a special character in their CSV exports. Specifically the thorn character and it’s a pain. But Ruby can make it better.

You can skip to the bottom of this article for the neccessary code or read on from here for more details about figuring out the path to certainty.

Unicode

Find the unicode character. For my example the thorn character þ is represented as u00FE.

List Encoding Types available to Ruby 2

2.0.0p0 :001 > Encoding.name_list
 => ["ASCII-8BIT", "UTF-8", "US-ASCII", "Big5", "Big5-HKSCS", "Big5-UAO", "CP949", "Emacs-Mule", "EUC-JP", "EUC-KR", "EUC-TW", "GB18030", "GBK", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-2", "ISO-8859-3", "ISO-8859-4", "ISO-8859-5", "ISO-8859-6", "ISO-8859-7", "ISO-8859-8", "ISO-8859-9", "ISO-8859-10", "ISO-8859-11", "ISO-8859-13", "ISO-8859-14", "ISO-8859-15", "ISO-8859-16", "KOI8-R", "KOI8-U", "Shift_JIS", "UTF-16BE", "UTF-16LE", "UTF-32BE", "UTF-32LE", "Windows-31J", "Windows-1251", "BINARY", "IBM437", "CP437", "IBM737", "CP737", "IBM775", "CP775", "CP850", "IBM850", "IBM852", "CP852", "IBM855", "CP855", "IBM857", "CP857", "IBM860", "CP860", "IBM861", "CP861", "IBM862", "CP862", "IBM863", "CP863", "IBM864", "CP864", "IBM865", "CP865", "IBM866", "CP866", "IBM869", "CP869", "Windows-1258", "CP1258", "GB1988", "macCentEuro", "macCroatian", "macCyrillic", "macGreek", "macIceland", "macRoman", "macRomania", "macThai", "macTurkish", "macUkraine", "CP950", "Big5-HKSCS:2008", "CP951", "stateless-ISO-2022-JP", "eucJP", "eucJP-ms", "euc-jp-ms", "CP51932", "EUC-JP-2004", "EUC-JISX0213", "eucKR", "eucTW", "GB2312", "EUC-CN", "eucCN", "GB12345", "CP936", "ISO-2022-JP", "ISO2022-JP", "ISO-2022-JP-2", "ISO2022-JP2", "CP50220", "CP50221", "ISO8859-1", "Windows-1252", "CP1252", "ISO8859-2", "Windows-1250", "CP1250", "ISO8859-3", "ISO8859-4", "ISO8859-5", "ISO8859-6", "Windows-1256", "CP1256", "ISO8859-7", "Windows-1253", "CP1253", "ISO8859-8", "Windows-1255", "CP1255", "ISO8859-9", "Windows-1254", "CP1254", "ISO8859-10", "ISO8859-11", "TIS-620", "Windows-874", "CP874", "ISO8859-13", "Windows-1257", "CP1257", "ISO8859-14", "ISO8859-15", "ISO8859-16", "CP878", "MacJapanese", "MacJapan", "ASCII", "ANSI_X3.4-1968", "646", "UTF-7", "CP65000", "CP65001", "UTF8-MAC", "UTF-8-MAC", "UTF-8-HFS", "UTF-16", "UTF-32", "UCS-2BE", "UCS-4BE", "UCS-4LE", "CP932", "csWindows31J", "SJIS", "PCK", "CP1251", "UTF8-DoCoMo", "SJIS-DoCoMo", "UTF8-KDDI", "SJIS-KDDI", "ISO-2022-JP-KDDI", "stateless-ISO-2022-JP-KDDI", "UTF8-SoftBank", "SJIS-SoftBank", "locale", "external", "filesystem", "internal"]

Determine Encoding Type

Encoding.name_list.each do |encoding|
  CSV.foreach(file_path, { encoding:encoding, :col_sep => "\u00FE" }) do |row|
    puts "===== #{encoding} ====="
    puts row.inspect
    break
  end
end

Use Thorn as Delimiter in CSV

CSV.foreach(file_path, { encoding:'ISO-8859-1', :col_sep => "\u00FE" }) do |row|
  # your code here
end