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"...needs a colon..." That's the crux of it. Its not a matter of what is needed, but its a matter of what other people do with and to the data. I want to find a simple way to never get tricked with embedded commas, apostrophes, colons, or other special characters. Enclosing every field including numeric fields in paired quotes will do that, and I have done that in the past with success or at least I thought it was with success. I would prefer to use the comma delimiter as it is the most widely used and understood on the Dark Side. However something that was said the other day makes me think I may have screwed up. I know, I know. its hard to believe I'd screw up. --------------------------------------------------------- Booth Martin http://www.MartinVT.com Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx --------------------------------------------------------- -------Original Message------- From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion Date: Sunday, April 20, 2003 15:12:03 To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion Subject: Re: CSV file and the delimiter Booth, I don't use CSV files much, but I do send a lot of data in a string to a PC and back via sockets. I use a colon (yeah, I know...it's a crappy choice, but what'ya gonna do? :-) Sorry! Couldn't resist!)....as the delimiter. I've yet to have text that actually needs an embedded colon in it so the colon makes a great delimiter for parsing on both sides of the equation. Shannon O'Donnell ----- Original Message ----- From: "Booth Martin" <Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2003 9:37 PM Subject: CSV file and the delimiter > > I'd be interested in some feedback on building CSV files. > > When one uses the comma delimiter one must deal with the possibility of > embedded commas within the character data. Enclosing character fields in > matched quotes will deal with that, but what happens if you enclose all > fields in matching quotes, even numeric fields? > > Will Excel accept a numeric column as numeric, even if its in quotes? Would > it understand that an edited numeric field "-$1,000,000.00" is a negative > number? > > > --------------------------------------------------------- > Booth Martin http://www.MartinVT.com > Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx > -------------------------------------------------------
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