Escaping Quotes

[maliary]

Hello, Ok, we've gone round and round on this, so let me place an open question. I have a data table where some field values have this ". e.g. Nail 4". I need to replace this with \" as they are bringing error on my excel output. How can I access each field value and replace the " with \" ? Please help me, I'd really appreciate your help.

Let's do this !

[blackjack2150]

string initial = "\""; //just a quote char
string final = initial.Replace("\"", "\\\"")); //now it's backslash and quote

[maliary]

Thanks for that, I have it already. But how do I apply this to all the elements in the table ?

Let's do this !

[Mycroft Holmes]

You need to use foreach and process each row in the table. You may be able to use linq to do an update but I don't know linq yet!

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

[Guffa]

How are you outputting the Excel, what kind of errors do you get, and why do you think that \" should be used to escape the quotation marks? I would rather expect that "" should be used...

Despite everything, the person most likely to be fooling you next is yourself.

[maliary]

Ok, I am getting data from a datatable and exporting it to an excel sheet. I was using the RKLib.Export library, however this doesn't handle " quotes in the field values. It displays unintelligible data. So I decided to use the function I am asking about to clean out the datatable before exporting it. By the way, do you know where I would get code to export data to excel which handles quotes ?

Let's do this !

[PIEBALDconsult]

That would also be a clue that what you think is a " is not a ", find out what it is.

modified on Friday, August 15, 2008 9:52 AM

[Guffa]

I found very little about RKLib.Export when searching for it. Does it export to CSV? In that case, escaping quotation marks with a backslash will not help you at all. A value in CSV that contains commas (or whatever separator is used), line breaks or quotation marks should be enclosed with quotation marks, and quotation marks are escaped by putting double quotation marks in the value. If the library doesn't handle escaping at all, you can do something like this:

if (value.indexOfAny(new char[]{ ',', ';', '"', '\x0d', '\x0a'}) != -1) {
value = "\"" + value.Replace("\"", "\"\"") + "\"";
}

Despite everything, the person most likely to be fooling you next is yourself.

[maliary]

Here is the complete link : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ExportClassLibrary.aspx[^]