Re: Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:35:33AM +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote: <snip> > > The .csv format is just a plain text format, so you won't get formatting > or formulas in your 'sheets' (csv is also a sheetless format) but it's > been used for years by many systems for data. > > A lot of database systems will let you import csv files as well, which > is quite convenient, although you will have to make sure the csv uses > commas to delimit the data. Microsoft managed to basterdise this format > a bit as well, and lets you use tabs, spaces and all sorts of other > characters to delimit data fields. Someone obviously didn't mention to > them that the file type is 'comma separated values'! I process a lot of CSV files, and what I typically see is that Excel will enclose fields which might contain commas in quotes. This gets messy. So I finally wrote a C utility which parses the file and yields tab-delimited records without the quotes. Paul -- Paul M. Foster