Parse CSV where headers contain spaces with CsvHelper

Question

I have a CSV file with field headers and some of them contain two or three words separated by spaces:

You can see in the above picture the field headers that contain spaces:
"Time of Day", "Process Name", and "Image Path".

When I tried to read the CSV by calling reader.GetRecords<DataRecord>(); (where DataRecord is a class I have defined), I get the error:

Fields 'TimeOfDay' do not exist in the CSV file."*

This is because my DataRecord class can't contain members with spaces.

How can I use CsvHelper to parse the CSV file?

Answer 1

Based on CsvHelper Documentation, there are several ways that we can achieve our desired results.

1. Ignore White Space from Headers (which I believe should solve your problem easily)

In CsvHelper 3 or later, use PrepareHeaderForMatch (documented at http://joshclose.github.io/CsvHelper/configuration#headers) to remove whitespace from headers:

csv.Configuration.PrepareHeaderForMatch =
    header => Regex.Replace(header, @"\s", string.Empty)

In CsvHelper 2, set the IgnoreHeaderWhiteSpace flag which tells the reader to ignore white space in the headers when matching the columns to the properties by name.

reader.Configuration.IgnoreHeaderWhiteSpace = true;

2. Read Manually

We can read each field manually like:

var reader = new CsvReader(sr);
do
{
    reader.Read();                   
    var record=new DataRecord();

    record.TimeOfDay=reader.GetField<string>("Time of Day");
    record.ProcessName=reader.GetField<string>("Process Name");
    record.PID=reader.GetField<string>("PID");
    record.Operation=reader.GetField<string>("Operation");
    record.Path=reader.GetField<string>("Path");
    record.Result=reader.GetField<string>("Result");
    record.Detail=reader.GetField<string>("Detail");
    record.ImagePath=reader.GetField<string>("Image Path");

} while (!reader.IsRecordEmpty());

3. Class Mapping:

We can manually map between our class's properties and the headings in the CSV file using name class mapping like this:

public sealed class DataRecordMap:CsvClassMap<DataRecord>
{
    public DataRecordMap()
    {
         Map( m => m.TimeOfDay).Name("Time Of Day");
         Map( m => m.ProcessName).Name("Process Name");
         Map( m => m.PID).Name("PID");   
         Map( m => m.Operation).Name("Operation");    
         Map( m => m.Path).Name("Path");
         Map( m => m.Result).Name("Result");
         Map( m => m.Detail).Name("Detail");
         Map( m => m.ImagePath).Name("Image Path");
     }
}

Then we should register it using:

reader.Configuration.RegisterClassMap<DataRecordMap>();