On 19/09/2017 4:10 PM, Ista Zahn wrote:
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljoh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Last week one of our clients reported trouble with a csv file I
generated with write.table. He said that columns with quotes for
character variables were rejected by their data importer, which was
revised to match the way Microsoft Excel uses quotation marks in
character variables. I explained to them that quoted character
variables are virtuous and wise, of course, but they say Microsoft
Excel CSV export no longer quotes characters unless they include
commas in the values.
They showed me a CSV file from Excel that looked like this
x1,x2,x3,x4 5 6
fred,barney,betty,x
bambam,"fred,wilma",pebbles,y
Note how the quotes only happen on row 2 column 2. I was surprised it
did that, but now I have some pressure to write a csv maker that has
that structure.
I think you should resist that pressure.
That depends on whether this is a paying client or not.
> It really makes no sense to
write a .csv parser that _only_ supports .csv files created by Excel.
That's true, but if that's what they want to do, and they're willing to
pay to be able to write files that imitate Excel, then why not do what
they ask?
On the other hand, if they aren't willing to pay for the work, then you
should lecture them on how silly their request is.
In any case, base R functions should not include nonsense, so this is
not something that should go into R.
Duncan Murdoch
If you're going to use Excel as a model, a more sensible approach
would be to write a csv parser that supports all the formats that
Excel itself supports; Excel of course has no problem importing
"x1","x2","x3","x4"
"fred","barney","betty","x"
"bambam","fred,wilma","pebbles","y"
So, seriously, tell them to just fix their csv parser. Since they seem
hung up on Excel, it may help to point out that it does in fact import
csv produced by write.csv without complaint.
Best,
Ista
Its weird, even when there are spaces in values there
are no quotation marks.
Has anybody done this and verified that it matches CSV from MS Excel?
If I succeed will you consider a patch?
pj
--
Paul E. Johnson http://pj.freefaculty.org
Director, Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis http://crmda.ku.edu
To write to me directly, please address me at pauljohn at ku.edu.
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