Parsing a csv-file

Hi,

Excel, LibreOffice Calc & Co can save / export a worksheet to a CSV-file. That's fine. They're using commas as delimiters, there's no way to change that in LibreOffice Calc at least. If one or more delimiter/s are contained in an exported cell, the value is simply enclosed in apostrophes. Traversing a string read from the csv-file with fReadLine using ExtractString( ... ) is rather difficult. As an example

123,this Is the first line, "12,23"
456,"this is, btw, the second line",2450
"47,78",this is the third line,765

You see, the delimiter (comma) can appear anywhere within the line. Is there any good solution to this?

Kind regards,
Guenter Predl
office@windev.at

just checked in libreoffice:
save as CSV
confirm CSV and not ODT
'Export Text File' windows open and lets you choose field delimiter and string delimiter and.... like every other calc application I have ever seen

Hi Argus, thank's a lot!!

Kind regards,
Guenter Predl
office@windev.at

Hi Argus,

thank you very much! You just saved me from writing hundreds of lines of code! I only looked at the csv-file that I got from our customer. Yesterday I asked him to re-export the data from their Excel and use the | character as a field separator - not the darned comma. And ho and below, the csv-file is a simple thing to read now! Thank you for your advice!

Kind regards,
Guenter Predl
office@windev.at



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2021 07:52AM by gpredl.

Hi all

CSV export from Excel takes the settings from the Windows Regional Settings (Option "More Settings").
In there on the "Numbers" tab you can define the "list separator" character.
If you set that to a pipe "|" Excel will export to csv with the fields separated by a "|".
At least that is how it worked in the old days.
Guess it is still the case.

Cheers

Peter Holemans

Hi Peter,

yes, it still does so ... greetings!

Kind regards,
Guenter Predl
office@windev.at