We did a lot of this in the 90s and aughts, with customers as far away as Louisiana and Indiana ;) and no one agrees on what CSV "standard" means. You could go the "AI" way of performing a FileToStr() and trying to parse out what the creator intended, but I think that might be overkill, and dates are ambiguous, even on a good day. "3/8/20" means... ?
Our customers were in a similar situation: their customers were shipping them price lists and inventory lists in every format known. When they would explain they needed the format to be stable, the next month's sheets would show up with new columns added (and sometimes hidden!) and others re-arranged. We ended up leaving it to our customers to use Excel to import what they were sent, and reformat it as needed to a standard format, and exporting THAT as a strict CSV to import into the system. It was too much work to reinvent the wheel already built into Excel. "Be liberal in what you accept, but strict in what you emit" -- Postel's Law, roughly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 9:42 AM Richard Kaye <rk...@invaluable.com> wrote: > Throwing this one out to the collective wisdom. We're doing a lot with CSV > import/experts these days with our web-based WWC application and are > running into issues with regionalization. Here in the US, a "standard" CSV > means commas between data elements and double quotes around text elements. > But in Belgium, the delimiter is the semi-colon and text elements are not > wrapped in double quotes. As best I can tell, Excel determines what format > to use by the OS settings and not its own application settings. This makes > importing from a CSV a bit of a dance for our Belgian clients as they have > to change their regional settings, import the file that was received in US > format, and then change their settings back. And, of course, changing > region affects date and currency formats. For those of you working with > clients from multiple locations where the standards may be different, what > strategies do you use to deal with this? > > TIA > > -- > > rk > > > > --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- > multipart/alternative > text/plain (text body -- kept) > text/html > --- > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: https://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: https://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: https://leafe.com/archives This message: https://leafe.com/archives/byMID/cacw6n4tapy6pi8e6smtp1nq37vgjhovxngmccmbb4uovfvg...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
