writing a .csv file - independent of the culture

Question

In German langauage- decimal seperators are , and value seperators are ";" . In English/other languages, decimal seperators are . and values seperators are ",".

I want to create a .csv file indepedent of the current culture. I mean always the .csv file should have "." has decimal seperators and "," has value seperators.

The code for this given below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Globalization;

namespace CSV_FILE_FORMAT
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string aFileName = "result.csv";
            FileStream aFileStream = new FileStream(aFileName, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.ReadWrite, FileShare.None);
            StreamWriter m_StreamWriter = new StreamWriter(aFileStream);
            double[] values = new double[] { 10.5, 20.3, 30.2 };
            for(int i = 0; i < values.Length;i++)
            {
                m_StreamWriter.Write(values[i].ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
                m_StreamWriter.Write(",");
            }
        }
    }
}

The problem with this code is if OS is in German. The decimal seperators are shown "," instead of ".".

Please let me know the code is missing something.

Answer 1

You can probably get decimal separator and list separator from the current culture.

CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo(currentCultureName);
string decimalSeparator = culture.NumberFormat.NumberDecimalSeparator;
string listSeparator = culture.TextInfo.ListSeparator;

And, if the value being written contains any of the separators then, enclose the value within double quotes.

string val = values[i].ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
if(val.Contains(decimalSeparator) || val.Contains(listSeparator))
{
    val = string.Format("\"{0}\"", val);
}
m_StreamWriter.Write(val);
m_StreamWriter.Write(listSeparator);

Current culture name can be something like this: "en-US" for United States of America.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

A quick solution so solve the German culture problem is to embed those double values with quotes. Results:

English: "10.5","20.3","30.2"
German: "10,5","20,3","30,2"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values