Invalid char between encapsulated token and delimiter in Apache Commons CSV library

I am getting the following error while parsing the CSV file using the Apache Commons CSV library.

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: (line 2) invalid char between encapsulated token and delimiter at org.apache.commons.csv.Lexer.parseEncapsulatedToken(Lexer.java:275) at org.apache.commons.csv.Lexer.nextToken(Lexer.java:152) at org.apache.commons.csv.CSVParser.nextRecord(CSVParser.java:450) at org.apache.commons.csv.CSVParser.getRecords(CSVParser.java:327) at parse.csv.file.CSVFileParser.main(CSVFileParser.java:29) 

What's the meaning of this error ?

5 Answers

We ran into this issue when we had embedded quote in our data.

0,"020"1,"BS:5252525 ORDER:99999"4 

Solution applied was CSVFormat csvFileFormat = CSVFormat.DEFAULT.withQuote(null);

@Cuga tip helped us to resolve. Thanks @Cuga

Full code is

 public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { FileReader fileReader = null; CSVFormat csvFileFormat = CSVFormat.DEFAULT.withQuote(null); String fileName = "test.csv"; fileReader = new FileReader(fileName); CSVParser csvFileParser = new CSVParser(fileReader, csvFileFormat); List<CSVRecord> csvRecords = csvFileParser.getRecords(); for (CSVRecord csvRecord : csvRecords) { System.out.println(csvRecord); } csvFileParser.close(); } 

Result is

CSVRecord [comment=null, mapping=null, recordNumber=1, values=[0, "020"1, "BS:5252525 ORDER:99999"4]] 

That line in the CSV file contains an invalid character between one of your cells and either the end of line, end of file, or the next cell. A very common cause for this is a failure to escape your encapsulating character (the character that is used to "wrap" each cell, so CSV knows where a cell (token) starts and ends.

I found the solution to the problem. One of my CSV file has an attribute as follows: "attribute with nested "quote" "

Due to nested quote in the attribute the parser fails.

To avoid the above problem escape the nested quote as follows: "attribute with nested """"quote"""" "

This is the one way to solve the problem.

We ran into this in this same error with data containing quotes in otherwise unquoted input. I.e.:

some cell|this "cell" caused issues|other data 

It was hard to find, but in Apache's docs, they mention the withQuote() method which can take null as a value.

We were getting the exact same error message and this (thankfully) ended up fixing the issue for us.

I ran into this issue when I forgot to call .withNullString("") on my CSVFormat. Basically, this exception always occurs when:

• your quote symbol is wrong
• your null string representation is wrong
• your column separator char is wrong

Make sure you know the details of your format. Also, some programs use leading byte-order-marks (for example, Excel uses \uFEFF) to denote the encoding of the file. This can also trip up your parser.