Escaping commas when writing a CSV file

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1

I have a page that creates a table from a database, and I want to offer a CSV version of that table for download. I used <cffile> to create the CSV, and it works perfectly, except that some of the cells may contain commas, which throws off my CSV file.

Here’s my code:

<cffile action="write"
		file="#expandpath(".")#\\filename.csv"
		output="Title,Nominating Agency,Nominee Agency,State,Categories,Finalized"
		addnewline="yes">

<cfoutput query="nomadmin">
<cffile action="append"
		file="#expandpath(".")#\\filename.csv"
		output="#trim(nom_title)#,#trim(user_org)#,#trim(nom_agency)#,#trim(nom_state)#,#trim(nom_category)#,#iif(finalized eq 1,DE("Yes"),DE("No"))#"
		addnewline="yes">
[...html code for table here...]
</cfoutput>

Is there any way to escape the commas in the column values to keep them from throwing off my columns in the CSV?

2

put doublequotes around field values

<cffile …
output='"#trim(nom_title)#","#trim(user_org)#","#trim(nom_agency)#","#trim(nom_state)#","#trim(nom_category)#","#iif(finalized eq 1,DE("Yes"),DE("No"))#"’

3

Oh nice trick! I had tried that, but I got an error because I didn’t think to try the single quotes around the list.

Thanks!