Re: IBM Query generated file to CSV?

Hi John -

On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:07:07 -0400, John Yeung
<gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, there's not really any such thing as "the CSV standard". There
are various dialects or variants, the most common one being Excel's.
It's true that most or perhaps even all dialects will accept
surrounding quotes whether needed or not; but if your data will be
opened in Excel (or something which parses CSV the way Excel does),
and you have quotes inside your data, you must be sure to double them.
That is, for every double-quote character (") inside your data, you
need to write two adjacent double-quote characters ("") in your CSV
file.

Excel's handling of CSV files sucks. Especially its insistence on
treating character strings that are valid numbers as numbers, even if
they are enclosed in double-quote characters.

My service program routine does double up any double-quote characters
inside character data. That's part of the standard (and I'm not
talking about anything that Excel may or may not do).

Because it encloses all character strings inside double-quote
characters, I don't need to worry about any special characters inside
of the character data except the double-quote characters themselves.

Ken
Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views
of my employer or anyone in their right mind.