Configuration

The various "fetch" methods of the CSV connector take the same parameters:

Parameter	Data type	Description	Default
filename	string	This is the name of the file to read. The reference to the file can use any of the following syntaxes: absolute file path: /var/foo/web/fileadmin/import/bar.csv (within the TYPO3 root path or TYPO3_CONF_VARS[BE][lockRootPath]) file path relative to the TYPO3 root: fileadmin/import/foo.csv file path using EXT:: EXT:foo/Resources/Private/Data/bar.csv fully qualified URL, e.g. http://www.example.com/foo.csv FAL reference with storage ID and file identifier: FAL:2:/foo.csv custom syntax: MYKEY:whatever_you_want, see Connector Services
encoding	string	Encoding of the data found in the file. This value must match any of the encoding values recognized by the PHP libray "mbstring". See https://www.php.net/manual/en/mbstring.supported-encodings.php
delimiter	string	The character used to separate the various fields on each line of the file.	, (comma)
text_qualifier	string	The character used to wrap text fields.	" (double quote)
skip_rows	string	The number of rows to ignore at the beginning of the file. This has an additional special meaning if larger than 0. The CSV connector will take the first line and read column labels from it. These labels will then be used as keys in the array of data returned. The other skipped lines are totally igonred. Note This does not apply when using the fetchRaw() method.	0
locale	string	A locale string, according to the locales available on the server. This may not be necessary. However it may happen to be needed to handle badly-encoded files for example. The symptom is special characters – like umlauts – disappearing in the imported data.

Once the data is read it is converted from the encoding given as a parameter to the current encoding (either FE or BE, as stored in \TYPO3\CMS\Lang\LanguageService::$charSet), if they are not the same. If the encoding parameter is left empty, no conversion takes place.

Warning

Beware of incomplete data in the CSV file. It will result in variable results depending on the position of the missing data. Consider the following CSV data:

foo;12;aaa
bar;42
baz;;bbb
 ;;ccc
36

Empty columns before the last one will be returned as empty strings. Missing columns at the end of each row simply do not exist. The above data will be returned as the following PHP array:

'result' => [
        [
                'foo',
                '12',
                'aaa'
        ],
        // Missing columns at the end are totally missing in the result
        [
                'bar',
                '42'
        ],
        // Missing columns before the last one are returned as empty strings...
        [
                'baz',
                '',
                'bbb'
        ],
        // ...but spaces are preserved
        [
                ' ',
                '',
                'ccc'
        ],
        [
                '36'
        ]
)