Delineate data in exported CSV

Question

Hi everybody,
I hope this is a fairly simple query. I have a form with a table intended for collecting certain data. The columns represent different fields I need info for. The rows would be the data from different sources. So the columns are things like name, email, phone number etc. Each row in the form is data collected from a different person.
When I export the collected data as a CSV, instead of (for instance) all the email addresses being displayed one underneath the other in a single column, all the fields are their own column, so I end up with columns called name, email, phone number, each with one entry below them which is the data from the first row in the form. The columns start again with name, email, phone number and the data collected in the second row appears in these columns. And so it carries on across the excel sheet.  With some copying and pasting the fields can all be put correctly one under the other, but is there a way to specify this in the form setup?
We want to use the captured data for upload into our CRM software and it's a pain to have to sort the sheets first. It has a uploader function so as long as the CSV only has one column for each field but all entries are stacked in that column it will import
Thanks and hope question is clear enough
Darren

Answer 1

Every carriage return that you have in a jsp gets turned into a carriage return in the output.
For instance just these standard codes:
<%@ page import="java.util.*" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt" %>Result in 3 blank lines at the start - because there is a carriage return outside of tags
For generating HTML thats fine - it ignores all those carriage returns.
For generating CSV thats not so good.
To eliminate all the blank lines, you have to write code more like this
<%@ page import="java.util.*"
%><%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core"
%><%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt"
%>Note that the carriage returns all occur inside a JSP tag - that way they don't get translated into the HTML.
Better option is to generate the CSV in a servlet rather than a JSP :-)
Cheers,
evnafets