Red Hat Summit Red Hat SummitSupportConsoleDevelopersStart a trialContact

13.5. Multi-Record Field Definition Example

This is a CSV message: 
book,22 Britannia Road,Amanda Hodgkinson
magazine,Time,April,2011
magazine,Irish Garden,Jan,2011
book,The Finkler Question,Howard Jacobson
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
The CSV reader processes the message as shown: 
<csv:reader fields="book[name,author] | magazine[*]" rootElementName="sales" indent="true" />
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
This is the resulting output: 
<sales>
    <book number="1">
        <name>22 Britannia Road</name>
        <author>Amanda Hodgkinson</author>
    </book>
    <magazine number="2">
        <field_0>Time</field_0>
        <field_1>April</field_1>
        <field_2>2011</field_2>
    </magazine>
    <magazine number="3">
        <field_0>Irish Garden</field_0>
        <field_1>Jan</field_1>
        <field_2>2011</field_2>
    </magazine>
    <book number="4">
        <name>The Finkler Question</name>
        <author>Howard Jacobson</author>
    </book>
</sales>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
Note the syntax in the 'fields' attribute. Each record definition is separated by the pipe character '|'. Each record definition is constructed as record-name[field-name,field-name]. record-name is matched against the first field in the incoming message and so used to select the appropriate record definition to be used for outputting that record. Also note how you can use an asterisk character ('*') when you do not want to name the record fields. In this case (as when extra/unexpected fields are present in a record), the reader will generate the output field elements using a generated element name e.g. "field_0", "field_1" etc.
Red Hat logoGithubredditYoutubeTwitter

Learn

Try, buy, & sell

Communities

About Red Hat Documentation

We help Red Hat users innovate and achieve their goals with our products and services with content they can trust. Explore our recent updates.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. For more details, see the Red Hat Blog.

About Red Hat

We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.

Theme

© 2026 Red HatBack to top