Parsing CSV file using Java code example (Comma Separated File)

A CSV file is a comma-separated text file with double quotes as escape characters for a comma in a string element. In this tutorial, we will see how we can parse a CSV file using Java code example,

package com.code2care.tutorials;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;

/**
 * 
 * Java Code to process CSV file.
 * 
 * @author Code2care Tutorials
 *
 */
public class JavaArrayToArrayList {

	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

	String csvFilePath = "C:\\Users\\Code2care\\Desktop\\file\\data.csv";
	String line = null;
	BufferedReader bufferedReader = null;

	try {
		File csvFile = new File(csvFilePath);
		FileReader fileReader = new FileReader(csvFile, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
		bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(fileReader);

		while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {

			String[] csvLineElements = line.split(",");
			
			for (int i = 0; i < csvLineElements.length; i++) {
				System.out.println(csvLineElements[i]);
			}
		}
	}

	catch (IOException e) {
		System.out.println("Error Occured while parsing csv file.");
		e.printStackTrace();
	} finally {
		bufferedReader.close();
	}

}

}

SrNo,Name,Score
1,Mike,200
2,Alex,400
3,Steve,500
4,Alen,530
5,Kevin,108

Steps to parsing a CSV file using Java Code

1. Create a String object with he absolute path of the csv file to be read,
2. Create a FileReader class object, this class is used to reads text from character files using a default buffer size. Note if you are dealing with UTF-8 encoding make sure you use constructor FileReader(File file, Charset charset). Note that FileReader is meant for reading streams of characters to read streams of raw bytes you should use FileInputStream.
3. Create an object of BufferedReader to read text from a character-input stream, we pass the FileReader object to its constructor.
4. Now using a while loop iterate while bufferedReader.readLine() is not null.
5. In the while loop, read the elements of the line by splitting the line by comma regex.
6. Now you have access to each element of a CSV file.