How to write to a CSV file in C

Writing to a CSV using C code

A basic CSV file relies on a comma-separated data format, which makes it straightforward to write to this file type from a c program.

First you will want to create a file pointer, which will be used to access and write to a file. Then we call fopen on this file pointer, passing in the name of the file we want to write to. In this scenario, I don't yet have a file called "MyFile.csv". A file with that name will automatically be created.

FILE *fpt;

fpt = fopen("MyFile.csv", "w+");

Next I will show how to use fprintf to write data to the file pointer. The line below shows how a row of column headers can first be written to the file. Notice how the values are comma-separated, and there is a "\n" at the end, indicating that it should go to the next row.

fprintf(fpt,"ID, Name, Email, Phone Number\n");

Once the header row is written, we can loop through our data, and write each index (in this case a person) to a row in the CSV file. The following would be placed in a loop, with each index being a different person.

fprintf(fpt,"%d, %s, %s, %s\n", id, name, email, phone);

After writing each row, we can close the file pointer.

fclose(fpt);

That's it! Your file will now contain however many rows of data have been written to it.