On 2018/05/01 4:20 PM, Simon Slavin wrote:
On 1 May 2018, at 3:01pm, Olivier Mascia <o...@integral.be> wrote:
My question was more generic, even though it didn't look that way: the well-known and (maybe too)
much-used software tool named Excel tend to encourage people to export "CSV" files which
are actually "SCSV" files (semi-colon separated values). So the need to script some data
happens regularly.
What kind of insanity would lead someone to invent semi-colon delimited format
when CSV already existed ? I bet it was a badly-thought-out solution for
European numeric formats which use a comma as a decimal point. Tell whoever
uses that format to stop.
*Sigh* If only...
There are only a couple of Countries using semi-colon list separators as
far as I am aware, but the problem is that one of those is Holland - not
exactly some third-World stow-away island that can be ignored. A lot of
the things we make had to be Holland-friendly and so allowing
semi-colon-happy CSV files became the norm.
I have successfully made a simple converter to read semi-colon CSV files
(in fact, to detect which separator is used), and convert if needed,
which does the trick, though it makes some important assumptions. (I'm
willing to share if interested, but it's a Windoze CLI, mail me direct
if needed).
To another post hating on Excel - Excel has many flaws, but this is not
one of them, it's a fault of the list-separator setting in the Windows
OS on which the Excel runs... It's also a flaw of software anyone may
make, where it will produce one sort of output in one Country and a
different kind in another, if you bother to use the locale settings.
Also, the doubled-double-Quote char escaping is the law of the CSV
standard, not of Excel, and backslash escaping is by no means more
common or more or less correct. All of CSV and all of SQL use doubled-up
quotes to escape strings - which must make it vastly more common than
anything else.
To make matters worse, some enlightened Dutchmen realise this semi-colon
insanity and so cleverly set their own computer's locale to use the
comma in stead of the semi-colon. So now you cannot trust that it will
use the semi-colon either - you HAVE to manually check and act accordingly.
Some other countries have other problems, like setting the decimal
separator to a comma - imagine that in a CSV file - completely breaking
it unless you cleverly Quote all the numeric values too, or ignore that
local setting too.... Just silly.
I agree - someone needs to be shot for this. I just can't really figure
out who.
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