On 18/12/06, Ricardo SIGNES <rjbs-ha...@lists.manxome.org> wrote:
The real hate for me, though, with CSV isn't asinine customers, but CSV itself.
People say "a CSV" file as if that were a reference to some well-understood
format. No two things seem to agree on whether a set of values can include
commas, newlines, escaped quotes, or what. Oh, and how do you escape quotes?
\" or "" or something even stupider?
Try opening a tab-separated file with Excel when the file name ends in
".csv" (a hate in itself. Yet I never see ".tsv" files). Splat! A big
pile of shit all over your screen. The work-around is to highlight the
first column and choose "Data -> Cells from Text" (paraphrased) or
something idiotic like that.
I could have sworn that there used to be an "import" menu item that
gave you a dialog box to select separator, etc., but I'm buggered if I
can find it these days. Thankfully I leave that to the Windows users;
OOo Calc does the right thing for me. For once.
--
Earle Martin
http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
