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Create CSV Table - How to add quote marks around a value to handle leading zeros

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Hi- My flow creates a CSV file that the user will open in Excel. One of the columns is zip code, which sometimes has a leading zero, for example 04101 When the user opens the CSV in Excel, it trims the leading zero off the zip code and displays 4101. The best solution I can think of is wrapping the value in quote marks on the CSV but I can't figure out how to do that. I tried: Concat('"',item()?['PracticeZip'],'"') but it returned """04101""" Obviously, the value I want printed on the CSV is "04101" with the quotes but without quotes around the quotes. Any suggestions on how to get this to work? Thanks

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v-yuazh-msft on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

You could take a try with expression below:

concat('"',item()?['PracticeZip'],'"')

I have made a test on my side to create a flow as below:

The expression in the Compose 2 as below:

concat('"',outputs('Compose'),'"')

The flow would run successfully as below:

Best regards,

Alice

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi Alice-
Thanks for the response, but the solution you provided does not work when pulling values from a SharePoint list and then placing them into a CSV.

To restate the problem, I want the csv export to look like this (for example):
Smith,John,16 Main St.,Portland,ME,"04101",Anesthesiologist, etc.
(I need the zip code in quotes so preceeding zeros will not be stripped off when opened in excel. )
The solution you provided casues this result:
Smith,John,16 Main St.,Portland,ME,"""04101""",Anesthesiologist, etc. (this does not render right in excel)

I've pasted my test flow below to demonstrate. The value in the sharepoint list is simply 04106.
Test Flow:
Result:

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v-yuazh-msft on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

Would you please add a () to the value as below:

Or you could add a space before the value as below:

Best regards,

Alice

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Community Power Pla... on at

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I have this issue too, has anyone found a solution for this?

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MarkStokes 561 on at

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I feel like this issue might not be a Flow issue, but rather an Excel issue. When you open the CSV file in excel (without surrounding the zip code with quotes) can you set the column data type to be Text so it just evaluates the content it finds literally?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hello,

the Flow I'm trying to build gets data from SharePoint and uploads a CSV to SFTP where the file will be processed by one of our Finance systems. This systems expects every value in the CSV to be surrouned by double quotes so

"1","Name","Address"

I open the CSV in Notepad, rather than Excel to see the format.

My Flow looks like this, and in the Concat I've tried setting a value to:
concat('"',item()?['Amount'],'"')
This results in """1""","""Name""" rather than "1","Name"

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WillPage 2,307 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I found this thread looking for an answer to the same problem. The idea above to use brackets instead gave me an idea:

Use a compose to define a string that you know will never appear in your data. It can be as long or short as you like, but it must be completely unique. The longer you make it the less likely it'll appear in your data. In my example I chose ^&

I tried both wrapping the value in a concat() function and also just by clicking the dynamic content in the Value box.
Next, replace the string with a quote throughout the whole CSV output:

In a test run, it seems to work for both methods of doing concat() and also just clicking the dynamic content:

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Paulie78 8,422 Moderator on at

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This is how Excel behaves when importing CSV files, but there is an easy solution. I posted the exact solution on this thread a few days ago:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Convert-CSV-Column-data-type-to-string/m-p/723680#M98892

Basically you insert a tab character before the value and then Excel will treat it as a text column. No need to insert quotes etc.

Just create a variable called charTab and copy and paste a tab into it. Then put that before your Zip code column and when you do the Excel import it will not be interpreted as a number.

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jerryveldhuis 4 on at

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While looking for a solution to this same problem I found this post.
Here is the solution I found:

The solution was found from this helpful solution:
https://superuser.com/questions/318420/formatting-a-comma-delimited-csv-to-force-excel-to-interpret-value-as-a-string

concat('="', item()['code'],'"')

This creates a csv value like this:
code
"=""010.3000"""

This caused excel (and apparently google spreadsheet) to force the value in the cell to literally:
="010.3000"

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GLMSDev 75 on at

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not sure if this helps. but replace function helped.

replace(...,'"""','"')

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