Delimit by commas on certain fields only

[hutchisd]

I have a csv file I am importing into Excel. All columns are comma delimited but there is a description column that contains commas, which is causing some problems. Is there a way to delimit only certain columns by commas and not delimit by commas in another column?

 

[Gerald Higgins]

This may be possible if you can find some kind of pattern that will allow you to identify the commas that are in the descriptions, and distinguish them from the others.

Can you do that ?

Or can you post maybe 2 or 3 examples of your data so that maybe people on this board can identify patterns ?

For example, if all the commas within descriptions were followed by a space character, and none of the others were, you could use Edit, Find and Replace, to find all the instances of ", " and replace them with some text string, let's say "zzz".
Then the remaining instances of "," would all be valid delimiters, and you could import the data.
Finally, you could use Find and Replace to find all the instances of "zzz", and replace them with ",".

 

[hutchisd]

This may be possible if you can find some kind of pattern that will allow you to identify the commas that are in the descriptions, and distinguish them from the others.

Can you do that ?

Or can you post maybe 2 or 3 examples of your data so that maybe people on this board can identify patterns ?

For example, if all the commas within descriptions were followed by a space character, and none of the others were, you could use Edit, Find and Replace, to find all the instances of ", " and replace them with some text string, let's say "zzz".
Then the remaining instances of "," would all be valid delimiters, and you could import the data.
Finally, you could use Find and Replace to find all the instances of "zzz", and replace them with ",".

I don't have an example since I'm on my home computer and not at work right now, but I did think about the possibility of there being a space after the comma in the column I don't want to delimit. There was no space so that wouldn't work. I did get the csv file changed to a tab delimited file from the person that generates the file, so it's not an issue anymore. I would like to see if there is a solution for this though, just for future reference. Thanks for the suggestion though!