Parsing CSV files in C#, with header

Is there a default/official/recommended way to parse CSV files in C#? I don't want to roll my own parser.

Also, I've seen instances of people using ODBC/OLE DB to read CSV via the Text driver, and a lot of people discourage this due to its "drawbacks." What are these drawbacks?

Ideally, I'm looking for a way through which I can read the CSV by column name, using the first record as the header / field names. Some of the answers given are correct but work to basically deserialize the file into classes.

A CSV parser is now a part of .NET Framework.

Add a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll (works fine in C#, don't mind the name)

using (TextFieldParser parser = new TextFieldParser(@"c:\temp\test.csv"))
{
    parser.TextFieldType = FieldType.Delimited;
    parser.SetDelimiters(",");
    while (!parser.EndOfData)
    {
        //Process row
        string[] fields = parser.ReadFields();
        foreach (string field in fields)
        {
            //TODO: Process field
        }
    }
}

The docs are here - TextFieldParser Class

P.S. If you need a CSV exporter, try CsvExport (discl: I'm one of the contributors)

CsvHelper (a library I maintain) will read a CSV file into custom objects.

var csv = new CsvReader( File.OpenText( "file.csv" ) );
var myCustomObjects = csv.GetRecords<MyCustomObject>();

Sometimes you don't own the objects you're trying to read into. In this case, you can use fluent mapping because you can't put attributes on the class.

public sealed class MyCustomObjectMap : CsvClassMap<MyCustomObject>
{
    public MyCustomObjectMap()
    {
        Map( m => m.Property1 ).Name( "Column Name" );
        Map( m => m.Property2 ).Index( 4 );
        Map( m => m.Property3 ).Ignore();
        Map( m => m.Property4 ).TypeConverter<MySpecialTypeConverter>();
    }
}

EDIT:

CsvReader now requires CultureInfo to be passed into the constuctor (https://github.com/JoshClose/CsvHelper/issues/1441).

Example:

var csv = new CsvReader(File.OpenText("file.csv"), System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

Let a library handle all the nitty-gritty details for you! :-)

Check out FileHelpers and stay DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself - no need to re-invent the wheel a gazillionth time....

You basically just need to define that shape of your data - the fields in your individual line in the CSV - by means of a public class (and so well-thought out attributes like default values, replacements for NULL values and so forth), point the FileHelpers engine at a file, and bingo - you get back all the entries from that file. One simple operation - great performance!

Parsing CSV files in C#, with header

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