On 2011.11.29 10:03, David Houlden wrote:
Hi,
I downloaded a csv bank statement from my bank today and ran it
through the
new CSV importer. I found one problem which is maybe a little unusual
and is
down to the way my bank formatted the file. I have attached an
editted version
of the file which contains the first record showing the headers and
the data
record which caused a problem.
The 5th field on the record in question is the Transaction
Description and it
contains a comma. That part of the field is however contained within
double
quote characters. The unusual feature is that only part of the field
is
contained in double quotes. The back end (which doesn't contain a
comma) is
not. Importing this file confuses the CSV importer and results in the
whole of
the record from the Transaction Description onwards being put into the
Transaction Description field even though there are other fields
delimited by
comma.
I appreciate that this may be unusual data but I would expect that
each record
should be broken into fields using the field delimiter but ignoring
any field
delimiters which are contained within double quotes (the text
delimiter).
Indeed, this file imports as I would expect into LibreOffice Calc.
If required I will raise a bug report for this.
Personally, I would say it is just lucky that LO imports this
correctly. In a delimited file, you should have only one value between
a pair of delimiters, and if it is a text field containing the
delimiter, it (the entire value) needs to be quoted. Quoting only part
of a field doesn't make any sense. Unfortunately, it's not clear to me
that the little that passes for a standard here sufficiently addresses
this issue. (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values). I suspect the
issue for the author of the plugin will be how flexible are the
routines used that actually parse the file.
Jack
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