Re: Converting tab delimited file to CSV

On Mon, February 18, 2008 12:08 pm, Graham Cossey wrote: > proceed accordingly... My biggest gripe with tab delimited files is > that they are quite a bit bigger than comma delimited files so I may > have to split the large files I receive into smaller 'chunks' to allow > them to be uploaded. This is not making sense... A tab-delimited file wil have a TAB character "\t" instead of comma "," A tab WITHIN the data then needs escaping as "\t" or somesuch. But commas to not need escaping with quotes. And quotes don't need escaping with double-quotes. So tab-delimited should be a TINY bit smaller or the same size. Perhaps your users are just uploading more data. > One thing I have noticed is that the files I create in my PHP script > (The script breaks a large file into smaller files of 25,000 > records/rows each.) when opened in Excel (by double-clicking the file > in Windows Explorer) came up with an unrecognised file format message > for all files except the first. If you ignore this message the tab > delimited files open OK but the comma separated ones do not. The > "except the first" made me think that there may be something "hidden" > at the beginning of the file to say what type of data follows. Some CSV files include a "header" line with the names of the fields in the first line. This is less common in tab-delimited, but not unheard of. -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So?