Apache Commons CSV - case insensitive headers?

Question

Is there a built-in feature in Apache CSV implementation to ignore header case when reading csv?

Some time ago we have implemented utility for converting CSV export files to SQL. For that we have choosen Apache CSV. Everything was perfectly fine until now, but yet now we've got a change request.

All CSV files we process must contain headers and now we should read those headers in case insensitive way, so our users don't have to put their effort in it and watch if CSV they created follows our header case requirments.

Code sample:

for (CSVRecord record : subsidiaryRows) {
    String name = record.get(Data.NAME));

where Data.NAME is

public static final String NAME = "Name";

And the problem obviously raises when the user uses "name" as column header in his CSV instead of "Name" with capital "N".

I have followed both the API and source but couldn't find anything. Is there a way how to force the CSVRecord use CaseInsensitiveMap for its mapping or anything similiar?

Answer 1

This feature was added to Apache Commons CSV 1.3 as CSV-159

Committed revision 1708685.

Answer 2

I think you have to handle csv headers to your convenience, before you parse CSV file with apache-commons-csv, you can do this with RandomAccessFile to overwrite case in first line (headers)

//convert headers to my 'known' format (ie: lowercase)
RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile("C:\\test.csv", "rw");
String firstLine = raf.readLine();
raf.seek(0);
raf.writeBytes(firstLine.toLowerCase());

//your normal process to parse CSV with commons csv

PS: I think is very difficult to achieve this in some other way, since is a closed api (every class is final and the headers mapping returns a copy of the internal headers map)