write string with comma and control characters to CSV

I have a string in the format:

val data = "some string\n , other \n string \t"

I want to write the above string to a single column in a single cell, as it is.

So, control characters should not have any effect and comma should not cause the string to be split into two separate CSV columns. So, what I want to be written in CSV is plain raw data:

some string\n , other \n string \t

But, what I get instead is in separated form:

some string

and

 other
string

So, far I have tried:

Attempt 1: "\"" + data + "\""

Attempt 2: raw"$data"

Attempt 3: s"""$data"""

But nothing seems to work.

How the data you write out is displayed in columns and rows depends on whatever is reading the CSV. What I understand from your question is that you want to write out something that will display "some string\n , other \n string \t" as is in the rendered CSV. For that, in most "flavors" of CSV -- CSV is notoriously poorly and inconsistently specified -- you'll need to quote the string, and escape the control characters.

So you'll end up with something like

val escaped = data.replace("\n", "\\n").replace("\t", "\\t")
val quoted = "\"" + escaped + "\""

and you use quoted.

There may be more characters you need to replace. When this becomes too unwieldy to do ad-hoc, you may want to use a CSV library that does the quoting and escaping for you. In that case, you might want to take a look at Kantan: https://nrinaudo.github.io/kantan.csv/

The \n you see in the string literal initializing variable data is not two characters but one (a newline). A newline written to a file is what separates two lines (its a bit more complicated than that - different topic). If you really want a backslash character followed by a 'n' in the file, you need to convert the newline into those two characters.

e.g.: outWriter.write(data.replaceAll("\n", "\\n"))

Note that the replacement has the double-backslash which is how a backslash character is created.

You will also need to un-escape any other control characters too. (There is probably some open-source library that has this already)

OR

You can double-backslash the string literals, so it can be written as-is.

Note: This was tagged Java, so I gave a Java answer. I don't know a Java write that uses commas as line separators. Is that a Scalia thing? (the other tag)

import scala.reflect.runtime.universe.{Constant, Literal}

val data = "some string\n , other \n string \t"
def escape(raw: String): String =
    Literal(Constant(raw)).toString

escape(data)

escape prints -> "some string\n , other \n string \t"

This should work for you