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Is it possible to read a csv file where the values are separated by a string rather than a single character? Earlier the csv file had a comma separator, but now it is being created with a string separator "###". I don't have any control over the creation of the csv file.

I'm using the Opencsv library http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencsv/ and it does not seem to have support for string separator only characters.

Is there a way to solve the above? Are there any good and similar alternatives to the Opencsv library?

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The docs give you an example of how to do this. See http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/#custom-sepators.

Can I use my own separators and quote characters?
Yes. There are constructors that cater for supplying your own separator and quote characters. Say you're using a tab for your separator, you can do something like this:

  CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader("yourfile.csv"), '\t');

And if you single quoted your escaped characters rather than double quote them, you can use the three arg constructor:

  CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader("yourfile.csv"), '\t', '\'');
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I've read that and they mention only single characters, not strings of characters
@aldrin Apparently there is no open source Java library that can handle multi-character CSV separators, as per my recent relevant question (stackoverflow.com/questions/8653797/…). If, however, in the mean time you have found one, please contribute there.
@PNS no i didn't find an alternative. I tried to modify OpenCSV to process multi-char separators, but it wasn't trivial. So I eventually replaced the multichars with a single char as a preprocessing step and continued.

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