On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 05:11:10AM -0700, Greg Stark wrote: > On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Peter Eisentraut <pete...@gmx.net> wrote: > > On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 10:12 -0700, Greg Stark wrote: > >> While i agree this looks nicer I wonder what it does to things like > >> excel/gnumeric/ooffice auto-recognizing table layouts and importing > >> files. I'm not sure our old format was so great for this so maybe this > >> is actually an improvement I'm asking for. But as long as we're > >> changing the format... It would at at least be good to test the > >> behaviour > > > > What exactly are you referring to here? > > run something like this: > > $ psql > stark=> \o /tmp/s > stark=> select generate_series(1,10),generate_series(1,5); > $ gnumeric /tmp/s& > $ ooffice /tmp/s& > $ kspread /tmp/s& > > With the 8.4 formatting gnumeric automatically guesses that | is the > separator and formats the speadsheet quite reasonably. Open Office > gets confused and opens the word processor, but if you do "insert > sheet from file" and manually deselect the space and semicolon > delimiters and put | as an "other" delimiter then it looks like it > should work. I don't have kspread handy. > > Does gnumeric still autorecognize the new formats? Do the newline > indicators in 8.4 mess up gnumeric? Are the new ones better or worse? > > This hasn't been a top priority in the past and the ReST discussion > seemed to end up concluding that we shouldn't bother if we can't make > it perfect. I'm not sure I agree with that, but in any case I think as > long as we're changing the format we may as well check to see what the > status is.
Surely if people want a machine-readable output format, they should either 1) use libpq or one of its bindings, or 2) use a dedicated machine-readable output format such as CSV, which is /designed/ for spreadsheet import. The standard psql output formats (aligned, unaligned) are for human-readable output and the others (latex, html, troff-ms) are marked up for the respective tools. None of these are really useful for other programs to parse. Wouldn't it be much simpler all around to add a "csv" output format in addition to the above for this purpose? Spreadsheets can read it in with no trouble at all. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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