Converting DataSet/DataTable to CSV

Question

Please let me know, if there any way to generate CSV files from a DataTable or DataSet? To be specific, without manually iterating through rows of DataTable and concatenating.

Please help

Answer 1

There are several ways to do that.

One of the simplest (IMO) is using FileHelpers Library

FileHelpers.CsvEngine.DataTableToCsv(dataTable, filename);

Answer 2

A relative simple, compact and quite flexible solution could be the following extension method:

public static string ToCsv(this DataTable table, string colSep = "", string rowSep = "\r\n")
{
    var format = string.Join(colSep, Enumerable.Range(0, table.Columns.Count)
                                            .Select(i => string.Format("{{{0}}}", i)));

    return string.Join(rowSep, table.Rows.OfType<DataRow>()
                                        .Select(i => string.Format(format, i.ItemArray)));
}

Please note that this solution could cause problems with huge amounts of data, in which case you should stream the output. Quoting and formatting would of course make the code more complex.