Excel – Importing CSV into Excel with commas in quoted fields

I just tried a quick test that replicated your problem.

I created a 1 line CSV in Word (which uses smart quotes) as test.csv “123”,“4,5,6” and it opened in Excel as you described.

Try replacing “ and ” with "

Having played with your sample I notice that Excel does not like the spaces between fields

e.g. instead of

"20051", "", "2009 Sep 30 02:53:23", ...

you want

"20051","","2009 Sep 30 02:53:23",...

a decent Regular Expression replacement should be able to handle it with

Find:    |("[^"]*",) |
Replace: |\1|

(pipe characters for visual cues only)

Or simply modify the .Net code if you have access to it ;-)

Also, as Arjan pointed out, you may also need to convert the file from UTF-8 to ANSI to prevent cell A1 from containing the BOM and its surrounding qoutes.

I have come across the Catch 22 of ANSI encoded CSV not handling international characters and UTF encoded CSV not being propery handled by Excel; and not found a solution while mainting the CSV. If international character support is required, the XML (or native XLS) formats seem the only way to go—at the cost of simplicity.

Use LibreOffice to open the file, then save in desired format: I had exactly the same problem you described when trying to use Excel 2010 to read UTF-8 MySQL data with multi-line Japanese text in some fields exported as quoted CSV with \r\n used for end-of-record (tried \r and \n also with no difference in Excel's behaviour). LibreOffice 4.1.3 imported the CSV file correctly, and I could save it in Excel 2010 xlsx format and thereafter open the xlsx file correctly in Excel.