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Supported CSV formats

This guide describes how your CSV data should be formatted so that Flexmonster can process it.

Example of a valid CSV file:

Title,Year,Genre,Director  
Inception,2010,Science Fiction,Christopher Nolan  
The Matrix,1999,"Action, Sci-Fi","Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski"  
Mad Max: Fury Road,2015,"Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi",George Miller  
Gladiator,2000,Historical Drama,Ridley Scott

Important points to consider:

  • Values containing line breaks or delimiters (e.g., commas) must be enclosed in double quotation marks.

  • If a value is quoted, double quotation marks inside the value must be represented by two double-quote characters. For instance, Specialty "Bike" Shop must be specified as "Specialty ""Bike"" Shop".

Other CSV formats aren’t officially supported and may have unexpected results.

In addition, CSV data may include embedded metadata.

Supported delimiters

In addition to a comma (,), values in records can be separated by a semicolon(;), pipe(|), or tab (\t).

Supported input date formats

Flexmonster supports the following date formats:

  1. ISO 8601. For example:

    • "2021-04-25" — date.

    • "2021-04-25T21:30:05" — date and time.

    • "2021-04-25T21:30:05+03:00" — date and time with a time zone.

  2. Unix timestamp in milliseconds. For example, "2021-04-25" is 1619298000000 when converted to a Unix timestamp in milliseconds.
    Note It is important to assign the date type to the Unix timestamp field explicitly. Otherwise, Flexmonster will treat this field as a numeric one.

Other formats aren’t officially supported and may be parsed incorrectly.

See also