There was probably a big internal push on at Microsoft at the time to create as many dependencies between Office applications and Windows as possible... 😉
I'll check Tamar's article. Thanks for the link. -- rk -----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech <profoxtech-boun...@leafe.com> On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 12:01 PM To: profoxt...@leafe.com Subject: Re: Variations in CSV settings by region Same here an hour north of the Mass border, freezing rain & snow all night, accumulating as the temp drops today. Ah, nothing like a New England spring! I should have done a web search on Belgian Excel CSV and semi-colons, it's a mess, as you indicated. It's called "comma-separated values" for a reason, but the MS Excel devs knew better, of course. Whoever was in charge of Begian regionalization of Excel got carried away, it appears. Highly recommended: Tamar's article on parsing, "Breaking Up is Not Hard To Do" (groan!): http://www.tomorrowssolutionsllc.com/Articles/Breaking%20Up%20is%20Not%20Hard%20to%20Do.pdf VFP has plenty of good text-parsing tools, as long as you can find consistent rules to work out, or at worst, FileToStr() the file and parse the string a character at a time. On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 10:33 AM Richard Kaye <rk...@invaluable.com> 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 > > > > > > > > --- 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/CACW6n4s1a_cb=LXwWF_X2gN=tKx=x36hnqmaxk-m1mn5pbi...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. 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