Writing .csv files from C++

Question

I'm trying to output some data to a .csv file and it is outputting it to the file but it isn't separating the data into different columns and seems to be outputting the data incorrectly.

    ofstream Morison_File ("linear_wave_loading.csv");         //Opening file to print info to     Morison_File << "Time Force(N/m)" << endl;          //Headings for file     for (t = 0; t <= 20; t++) {       u = sin(omega * t);       du = cos(omega * t);        F = (0.5 * rho * C_d * D * u * fabs(u)) + rho * Area * C_m * du;         cout << "t = " << t << "\t\tF = " << F << endl;       Morison_File << t;                                 //Printing to file       Morison_File << F;      }       Morison_File.close(); 

Time and Force(N/m) are in columns A and B respectively but the t and F values are both printing the first row.

What is the syntax to separate them to print t into column A and F into column B?

Answer 1

There is nothing special about a CSV file. You can create them using a text editor by simply following the basic rules. The RFC 4180 (tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180) accepted separator is the comma ',' not the semi-colon ';'. Programs like MS Excel expect a comma as a separator.

There are some programs that treat the comma as a decimal and the semi-colon as a separator, but these are technically outside of the "accepted" standard for CSV formatted files.

So, when creating a CSV you create your filestream and add your lines like so:

#include <iostream> #include <fstream> int main( int argc, char* argv[] ) {       std::ofstream myfile;       myfile.open ("example.csv");       myfile << "This is the first cell in the first column.\n";       myfile << "a,b,c,\n";       myfile << "c,s,v,\n";       myfile << "1,2,3.456\n";       myfile << "semi;colon";       myfile.close();       return 0; } 

This will result in a CSV file that looks like this when opened in MS Excel: