Today i found myself wanting to quickly export a dataset to CSV and i didn’t want to bloat of a library that does more than i need. The following method is the result of this need/want.

private string ConvertToCSV(DataSet objDataSet)
{
    StringBuilder content = new StringBuilder();

    if (objDataSet.Tables.Count >= 1)
    {
        DataTable table = objDataSet.Tables[0];

        if (table.Rows.Count > 0)
        {
            DataRow dr1 = (DataRow) table.Rows[0];
            int intColumnCount = dr1.Table.Columns.Count;
            int index=1;

            //add column names
            foreach (DataColumn item in dr1.Table.Columns)
            {
                content.Append(String.Format("\"{0}\"", item.ColumnName));
                if (index < intColumnCount)
                    content.Append(",");
                else
                    content.Append("\r\n");
                index++;
            }

            //add column data
            foreach (DataRow currentRow in table.Rows)
            {
                string strRow = string.Empty;
                for (int y = 0; y <= intColumnCount - 1; y++)
                {
                    strRow += "\"" + currentRow[y].ToString() + "\"";

                    if (y < intColumnCount - 1 && y >= 0)
                        strRow += ",";
                }
                content.Append(strRow + "\r\n");
            }
        }
    }

    return content.ToString();
}

Things to note:

- This won’t take care of field contents which contain double quotes, you may want to add support for this
- This only exports the first table in a dataset
- Its pretty quick and nasty, so don’t blame me if you have issues