Export to CSV - proper format

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
>
>> A simple way to change comma-delimited files with "," separating
>> records with a modern version of sed would be:
>> 
>> sed -e 's/","/\t/g' < /tmp/exported_file.txt > /tmp/exported_file.tsv
>
>Alas, that doesn't leverage the *primary* advantage of having your app
>do the export properly -- and I prefer '|' as a delimiter myself; it takes
>less space on the screen -- which is that *the app knows* which commas *were
>already in the data*, and which ones it added as delimiters.

The Unify RDBMS uses the pipe ``|'' as its default delimiter, but there's
always the problem if that character is in the data someplace.  I
don't know any way to get a tab into a data-entry field short of
using the standard \t escape which isn't in most folks mindset.

...
>None of this really probably matters to the the OP, though; he was almost
>certainly trying to talk to yet some other app, which may not accept
>anything but CSV (of which there are, I think either 4 or 6 'standard' 
>versions).
>
>"That's the nice thing about standards... there are so many of them."
>  -- John 'gnu at hoptoad' Gilmore

True enough.  That's why when I export data from our accounting
application to be imported into OpenOffice.org spreadsheets, I
use MySQL or Postgresql tables, creating the tables in a python script,
and using OO-calc's MySQL data interface to handle the import.  I
tried various CSV import methods, and none worked reliably to get
data formats correct.

Can FP still export to SYLK format, and Excel import it?

Bill
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