Is there a way to skip unwanted fields in a CSV file with Jackson?

I have some CSV files with several columns, but I just need to import some of these columns. The problem is that there are some columns at the beginning, some in the middle and some at the end of the line, like this:

id;name;address;bla;bla;bla;status;bla;bla;bla;value;another_value

And I want to write an object with only the necessary fields, like:

long id;
String address;
boolean status;
double value;
double another_value;

The problem is that these files have 79 columns, and I don't want to write a class with 79 properties and use only some of these properties.

It may be easier to just make a conversion to String[] and then write some code to convert into into an object.

You can deserialise the whole row to a Map and after that convert it to a required POJO. Below you can find an example:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.MappingIterator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat.csv.CsvMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat.csv.CsvSchema;
import lombok.Data;
import lombok.ToString;
import java.io.File;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
public class CsvApp {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
File csvFile = new File("./resource/test.csv").getAbsoluteFile();
CsvMapper csvMapper = CsvMapper.builder()
//ignore unknown columns
.disable(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES)
.build();
CsvSchema schema = CsvSchema.emptySchema().withHeader().withColumnSeparator(';');
MappingIterator<Map> rowsIterator = csvMapper
.readerWithSchemaFor(Map.class)
.with(schema)
.readValues(csvFile);
List<Row> rows = new ArrayList<>();
while (rowsIterator.hasNext()) {
Map rowAsMap = rowsIterator.next();
Row row = csvMapper.convertValue(rowAsMap, Row.class);
rows.add(row);
}
rows.forEach(System.out::println);
}
}
@Data
@ToString
class Row {
long id;
String address;
boolean status;
double value;
double another_value;
}

I used Lombok library to make an example short but you do not have to use it.

For below CSV payload:

id;name;address;bla1;bla2;bla3;status;bla4;bla5;bla6;value;another_value
33;Jack;Cave Street;1;2;3;true;4;5;6;123;234

Above code prints:

Row(id=33, address=Cave Street, status=true, value=123.0, another_value=234.0)