On 29/11/11 15:27, Jack wrote:
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
Actually, one of my test files does have a field separator within quotes
- coincidentally, provided by Jack - but in that case the whole of the
field is quoted, unlike in the current example.
However, we can't be beaten by Calc!
Allan
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