Using readtable with double-quote strings in .csv file

I am trying to read in a .csv file with double-quoted strings (i.e. "asdf") separated by commas. It does not seem that readtable can handle this gracefully when I have a string that contains a comma (i.e. "asdf,asdf"). It sees this as additional columns or something. The .csv file works fine with Excel 2007.

A sample/example file 'runFile.csv' with 3 columns. The top-row is:

"runName","runCount","runVal",

"runName" is an arbitrary string that may contain commas. "runCount", "resultVal" are doubles/integers.

Full sample file:

"runName","runCount","resultVal",
"asdf,asdf,asdf",1,1234,
"asdf,asdf,asdf",2,2345,
"asdf,asdf,asdf",3,3465,

When I run this in R2014b-64b (under Windows 7, 64-bit), I get:

>> T = readtable('runFile.csv')
Error using readtable (line 129)
Cannot interpret data in the file "runFile.csv'.  Found 4 variable names but 6 data columns.  You may need to specify a different format string, delimiter, or number of header lines.

I tried to use the extra parameter 'Format' with '%s%f%f' or something, but could not get it to work. I tried variations like '"%s"%f%f or something to no success.

I see that the release notes for R2014b shows some note about writetable now supporting double-quote strings using the 'QuoteStrings' parameter, but I could not find much more about this, or whether it is supported in readtable.

Thanks, Alex

[Al in St. Louis]

This is still a problem with R2021a

Answer 1

[Kuang-Chieh Yen]

The data format, %q, can be used to read data with double-quotes. So, you should replace %f and by %q. Maybe it works well. Moreover, I also recommend to run "datastore", for example

% get the information of yourdata
ds = datastore('yourdata.csv');
% import yourdata into T
T = read(ds);

HOPE IT USEFUL !

Answer 2

[Al in St. Louis]

Switch from MATLAB to Python. Pandas has no problem with a properly constructed CSV file. It's sad that readtable can't parse something this simple.