CSV import considerations

[Robert Helling]

On 17.09.2013, at 07:55, Miika Turkia <miika.turkia at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

> Parsing the CSV in C is doable but of course scripting languages like perl or python are a lot more flexible when it comes to parsing strings and outputting XML. But then again these script languages are not universal, especially one cannot assume them to be available on Windows (even though they can be installed there).

hmm. How often would a typical user want to import such a file? My guess would be only once in the transition to subsurface. Being a lazy perlmonger myself my approach would be to write a perl script to do this and for people who don't want to install a perl environment set up a web service (basically running the same script with a cgi wrapper) for the translation. But maybe this is too lazy for you more ambitions people.

I don't know what type of CSV files we are talking about but the bad news is that CSV can mean a lot of things, in particular with respect to quoting characters and field separators. Not to mention localization nonsense (I just fell into that trap recently: For the course I was teaching we had the marks from homework and exam in an libre office spread sheet and I wanted to convert that data to TeX to print certificates. So I wrote some perl glue for the translation. Unfortunately, the spread sheet was set to German localization which had commas in grades like 2,3 (meaning 2.3). Perl string to numeric translation starts at the beginning of the string and reads characters as long as they make sense as a number and then discards the rest. Of course it wants a '.' for the decimal place and thus read "2,3" as 2 when it comes to a numerical value. Which ended in me handing out certificates with wrong grades). 

What I wanted to say: Persing CSV might be more difficult than it is at first sight.

Best
Robert

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Robert C. Helling     Elite Master Course Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
                      Scientific Coordinator
                      Ludwig Maximilians Universitaet Muenchen, Dept. Physik
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