RE: Getting a Handle on RPG’s Open Access

The other part that I brought up, which indeed is a different issue, is a
combination of the above property plus two more: (1) CSV data actually has
no explicit types whatsoever (as much as some folks want it to), and (2) Excel
(the program) aggressively coerces what it believes to be numeric-looking
data into actual numeric data (which it
*does* distinguish from text).

"Aggressive" might even be understatement.

The implication being that if you write data to a CSV, and it's read by Excel,
you may not always get the data type you intended. Even the headings can
be interpreted in unintended ways. (The most dramatic being the case where
the heading of the first column is 'ID'!)

For one project I finally ditched CPYTOIMPF and converted every data field to an alpha string, and on some of the numeric fields I had to specially add an extra single-quote on the left to force Excel to make it alphanumeric. That was a date, in ISO format!






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