Introducing CSV Engine

What is CSV Engine?

CSV Engine is a mature and efficient .Net based development component for parsing, reading and writing comma seperated value (CSV) or similar file format data. Exposing a clean, bloat free and intuitive object model, the CSV Engine capabilities can be quickly and easily exploited by your .Net project, be it written in C#, VB or any other .Net based language. Even the source code is included, which you are free to modify to your custom requirements.

Why use CSV Engine?

Nearly every developer at some point needs to read or write data to or from a CSV format. While the format may appear simple, there are no officially recognized standards in how CSV data should parsed or stored. This can lead to some surprising quirks and bugs when transferring data between different systems. A robust parser must be able to handle a wider range of scenarios than may be superficially apparent.

In addition to providing robust data reading and writing, CSV Engine also provides the ability to manipulate CSV data in situations where other parsing or data storage options are not available or desirable. This additionally affords some insurance against future environmental changes for your applications. For example, the CSV Engine can be used to manage data on mobile devices using the .Net compact framework.

What else can CSV Engine do?

The CSV Engine library also includes powerful additional features beyond parsing and writing of CSV content. With these features you may:

Automatically filter duplicate rows from output.
Filter and navigate data through regular expressions.
Determine read progress for quick and easy meter implementation.
Access data by field name or by index.

What documentation is available?

Comprehesive documentation, including descriptive examples, is provided with the CSV installation package or can be accessed through this website. CSV Engine also fully supports intellisense within the Visual Studio IDE, making it as easy as possible to navigate and learn the available features.

Are there demonstration applications?

CSV Engine is also packaged with two small demonstration applications, CSV Console and CSV Editor. CSV Console allows you to read and write CSV file data from the command line with various filtering options, great for scheduled batch operations or ad-hoc conversions. CSV Editor provides a simple GUI for loading and saving CSV data into an editable grid. The source code for both applications is packaged with the installer so you can see and test a real implementation of the CSV Engine components.

Does CSV Engine support customization?

The CSV Engine supports alternately delimited file formats, such as tab delimited files, or allows you to specify your own delimiter characters for custom scenarios. You can also specify how whitespace is handled and different text encodings. Coupled with the source code, CSV Engine gives you the power to process any delimited file of any format, speedily and efficiently.

How do I get it?

Get started now by downloading the CSV Engine installer.