Non-standard control characters

The CSV specification (section 2.6. of RFC 4180) defines the following control characters:

• Field separator: ,
• Record delimiter: \r\n
• Field enclosure: "

FastCSV uses these control characters by default. However, you can change them using the CsvReaderBuilder or CsvWriterBuilder class.

Using non-standard control characters for Read

In the following example, a CSV file with non-standard control characters is read using FastCSV.

ExampleCsvReaderWithNonStandardControlCharacters.java

import de.siegmar.fastcsv.reader.CsvReader;

/// Example for reading CSV data with control characters that are
/// not the default/standard ones.
///
/// FastCSV supports Java 17 and later, but this code uses Java 25
/// for brevity, leveraging newer language features.
void main() {
    final String data = """
        'foo';'bar'
        'foo2';'bar2'
        """;

    CsvReader.builder()
        .fieldSeparator(';')
        .quoteCharacter('\'')
        .ofCsvRecord(data)
        .forEach(IO::println);
}

You also find this source code example in the FastCSV GitHub repository.

Note

The record delimiter cannot be configured when reading CSV files. FastCSV automatically detects the record delimiter while reading the CSV file.

Using non-standard control characters for Write

In the following example, a CSV file with non-standard control characters is created using FastCSV.

ExampleCsvWriterWithNonStandardControlCharacters.java

import de.siegmar.fastcsv.writer.CsvWriter;
import de.siegmar.fastcsv.writer.LineDelimiter;

/// Example for writing CSV data with non-standard control characters.
///
/// FastCSV supports Java 17 and later, but this code uses Java 25
/// for brevity, leveraging newer language features.
void main() {
    // The default configuration uses a comma as field separator,
    // a double quote as quote character and
    // a CRLF as line delimiter.
    CsvWriter.builder()
        .fieldSeparator(';')
        .quoteCharacter('\'')
        .lineDelimiter(LineDelimiter.LF)
        .toConsole()
        .writeRecord("header1", "header2")
        .writeRecord("value1", "value;2");
}

You also find this source code example in the FastCSV GitHub repository.