I have never seen a standard when it comes to CSV. I have stopped using
Excel and use Libre Office and when I try to save a file as CSV it
prompts for Character set, field delimiter and String delimiter.
Would the issue go away if you specified a tab as your field delimiter
and no string delimiter? Or do your customers have no control over the
production of the files?
Frank.
Frank Cazabon
On 16/04/2021 10:33 am, Richard Kaye wrote:
Hey Ted! It's snowing here in lovely MA right now... Happy April!
I agree but it's not so much the users getting creative with the required
formats (well, generally speaking...). The issue is what when the Belgian user
exports the data from Excel, it's going to default to semis and no quotes and
then our current import routine will choke. Ultimately I think I'm going to
have to build a pre-import parsing method.
--
rk
-----Original Message-----
From: ProfoxTech <profoxtech-boun...@leafe.com> On Behalf Of Ted Roche
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 10:26 AM
To: profoxt...@leafe.com
Subject: Re: Variations in CSV settings by region
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
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