Messy CSV (quoted commas, newlines, ragged rows)
A deliberately messy CSV: a quoted field with a comma, a quoted field with an embedded newline, escaped double-quotes, and ragged rows with too few and too many fields — the cases that break naïve parsers.
id,name,notes,amount
1,"Smith, John","Line one
Line two continues",100.50
2,"O'Brien","has ""quotes"" inside",200
3,Ragged Row,only three fields
4,"Too Many",field,here,extra,also,500
5,"Café résumé",unicode note,42.00
Specifications
- Quirks
- quoted commas, embedded newlines, escaped quotes, ragged rows
- Delimiter
- comma
- Encoding
- UTF-8
What is a .csv file?
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a plain-text tabular format where rows are lines and fields are separated by commas, with quoting rules for values that contain delimiters, quotes, or newlines. It has no formal type system and depends on encoding and dialect conventions. It is the most portable format for tabular data exchange.
How to use this file
Use an example CSV to test parsers against quoting and embedded-delimiter edge cases, header handling, encoding detection, and import pipelines into databases or spreadsheets.
Related files
- csv10,000-Row CSVA CSV with 10,000 data rows — for testing streaming parsers, memory handling, and import performance.
- csvClean CSVA clean, well-formed CSV with a header and 20 rows — the baseline case for CSV parser testing.
- csvHeaderless CSVA CSV with no header row — for testing parsers that must infer or be told the column names.
- csvLatin-1 Encoded CSVA CSV encoded in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) with accented names — for testing encoding detection and mis-decoding (it will look wrong if read as UTF-8).
- csvSemicolon-Delimited CSVA CSV that uses semicolons as the delimiter (common in European locales) — for testing delimiter detection.
- tsvTab-Separated Values (TSV)A tab-separated values file with a header and 20 rows — for testing TSV parsing and delimiter handling.
Generated by generation/data_tabular.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.