Rails - .csv export formatting strings incorrectly

Question

I am bumping into an issue in my Rails app where a .csv export of data from a table is not formatting correctly.

First of all, here is the code that generates the .csv export...

report_controller.erb

class Admin::ReportController < ApplicationController

    def index
        @report = Report.all

        respond_to do |format|
            format.html
            format.csv do
                headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment;
                filename=\"report-summary.csv\""
                headers['Content-Type'] ||= 'text/csv'
            end
        end
    end

end

index.csv.erb

<%- headers = ["Report Id", "Datetime", "Latitude", "Longitude", "Report Type"] -%>
<%= CSV.generate_line headers -%>
<%- @report.each do |report| -%>
    <%- row = [report.id, report.datetime, report.latitude, report.longitude, report.report_type.report_type] -%>
    <%= CSV.generate_line row -%>
<%- end -%>

As I was building this out, everything was working fine, until I got to the last column in the table, 'Report Type'. Here's what happens when that gets added:

Notice how that first entry has the HTML " leading and trailing? But the next one doesn't? And how the first one is distributed across additional headerless columns? And how the last one doesn't have the " but does have &amp in the middle (for an ampersand, of course)?

All of these values are stored as text in a ReportType table and they come through as strings in Rails and, as far as I can tell, there is absolutely nothing different about their data types anywhere, yet they are behaving differently when pulled out of the table.

If I take 'Report Type' out of the export, see how lovely my table is?

No skipped lines or anything!

It seems to me that these HTML characters - especially the leading and trailing double quotes - are causing at least some of the trouble here. I tried using .gsub('"', '') to remove them, but this has no effect.

Has anyone encountered this before or have any insight here?

I think your CSV file is coming out of ERB with HTML escaping turned on. Are you sure there's nothing in the source data like that? — tadman
– tadman, Commented Jul 28, 2016 at 0:22
@tadman Hmm... not that I know of - I'm a bit new to Rails - where would I look to check? — skwidbreth
– skwidbreth, Commented Jul 28, 2016 at 0:53

skwidbreth · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-28 01:05:22Z

1

Thanks to @tadman for pointing me in the right direction on this - I changed this line:

<%= CSV.generate_line row -%>

by adding raw like so:

<%=raw CSV.generate_line row -%>

And that did the trick. Whew!

Still, if anyone has other solutions for this, I would like to hear them.

answered Jul 28, 2016 at 1:05

skwidbreth

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