Convert CSV into XLS

Question

I'm working in a web application separated in blocks and I'm getting a CSV object from a work mate of mine which I must convert into XLS to be passed into an Excel Processor they built. This CSV object is delimited by the character ";".

What I'd like to know is how I can convert the CSV object into XLS programatically.

Answer 1

It should be easy for you to convert the CSV object into an array of arrays of strings and then do like in the following example (you'll need to add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel):

using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;

Excel.Application excel = new Excel.Application();
Excel.Workbook workBook = excel.Workbooks.Add();
Excel.Worksheet sheet = workBook.ActiveSheet;

var CsvContent = new string[][]
{
    new string[] {"FirstName", "UserName", "PostCode", "City"},
    new string[] {"John", "Smith", "4568", "London"},
    new string[] {"Brian", "May", "9999", "Acapulco"}
};

for (int i = 0; i < CsvContent.Length; i++)
{
    string[] CsvLine = CsvContent[i];
    for (int j = 0; j < CsvLine.Length; j++)
    {
        sheet.Cells[i + 1, j + 1] = CsvLine[j];
    }
}

workBook.SaveAs(@"C:\Temp\fromCsv.xls");
workBook.Close();

Answer 2

Does the output need to be in the legacy XLS format? If XLSX is acceptable, EPPlus is a great .NET library for writing spreadsheets. The older excellibrary can produce XLS files.

Only a few lines of code should be necessary for parsing the CSV file (just be careful of double quotation marks) and writing the output spreadsheet.