Export to CSV - proper format

[Flavius Moldovan]

Bill,

Using "tab" as a delimiter is an excellent  idea. I have tested it and it works great. This is exactly what I needed because our data entry guys use all possible printable characters from the keyboard (including '|').

Thank you very much,
Flavius.


On Oct 20, 2010, at 5:57 PM, Bill Campbell wrote:

> 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
> -- 
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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