CSV reader – backslash is always treated as an escape character

[rdarcy1]

This is:

- [x] a bug report
- [ ] a feature request

What is the expected behavior?

When required, the backslash should be treated as a normal character and not parsed as an escape character.

What is the current behavior?

The backslash acts as an escape character, so when at the end of a cell/field it escapes the closing quote and merges cells/lines.

What are the steps to reproduce?

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// CSV file with backslash at end of field
$contents = '"test field\"' . "\n" . '"another field"';
$filename = __DIR__ . '/test.csv';
file_put_contents($filename, $contents);


// Create a new reader
$reader = new PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Reader\Csv;

$spreadsheet = $reader->load($filename);

var_dump($spreadsheet->getActiveSheet()->getCell('A1')->getValue());

Output:

string(27) "test field\"
another field""

I know the backslash is commonly used as an escape character, but it would be good to at least have an option of turning this off, maybe with a $reader->setEscaping(false) method call. I'm currently dealing with third-party CSVs which contain backslashes (a poor design choice, but considering there's no universal standard I think it's perfectly valid).

RFC 4180 makes no mention of backslashes, using instead a quote character to escape quote characters.

Happy to put together a pull request if this change is deemed worthwhile.

[PowerKiKi]

This seems to make sense. As you probably figured out we use PHP native fgetcsv and we don't expose its $escape parameter. So we you can create a PR for that is covered with unit tests, I'll merged it.