Why won't my csv file imported as a vector layer have attribute table headers?

Question

I have a .csv file that has unique identifiers that I'd like to join with some legislative district shapefiles in QGIS. I've done this before, and the joins all worked fine -- and technically it still works if I memorize the order of the columns, though when I upload the .csv using "Add Vector Layer" like normal -- my .csv gets imported properly, except my headers are all in as the first row and the headers are all "field_1," "field_2," etc.

Converting the file to .dbf in OpenOffice and I attempted converting the line breaks by using this in Terminal:

tr '\15' '\n' < infile.csv > outfile.csv

Still no luck. Any other ideas to import my .csv and retaining all my column headers?

Answer 1

Use the Add Delimited Text Layer add option. It has much better handling of CSV then what OGR has via the Add Vector Layer add option.

Answer 2

I just realized that one of my column headers was solely a number -- which I thought I'd fixed. Sorry about that! If you're ever having this problem, please make sure none of your column headers are numbers; it makes QGIS assume it's a value instead of a header.