How to Use the Java Library Apache Commons CSV

Apache Commons CSV is a Java library for reading and writing files in CSV, or comma-separated values, format.

Overview

You can read CSV files one line at a time and split them by commas or tabs, but a developer’s real goal should not be parsing CSV itself. The goal should be to read CSV data and then process, transfer, store, or otherwise use it.

Supported CSV formats

RFC 4180
MS Excel
MySQL
TDF

Custom formats can be created with the fluent style API.

Applying the library

dependencies {
    implementation 'org.apache.commons:commons-csv:1.10.0'
}

Reading CSV with the library

The example below reads a CSV file.

package com.devkuma.apache.commons;

import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Reader;

import org.apache.commons.csv.CSVFormat;
import org.apache.commons.csv.CSVRecord;

public class ReadCSV {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            Reader in = new FileReader("file.csv");
            Iterable<CSVRecord> records = CSVFormat.EXCEL.builder().setHeader().build().parse(in);
            for (CSVRecord record : records) {
                String lastName = record.get("Last Name");
                String firstName = record.get("First Name");

                System.out.print(lastName + " ");
                System.out.println(firstName);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }

        System.out.println("Done");
    }
}

The contents of file.csv are as follows.

"Last Name","First Name"
aaaa,bbbb
cccc,dddd
eeee,ffff

Execution result:

aaaa bbbb
cccc dddd
eeee ffff
Done