Comment on "POSSIBLE DATA LOSS" (Excel reports, when you save a CSV)
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 2 days ago That is interesting. It’s been a llng time since I’ve used Excel or CSV, but I could’ve awore that you just needed to set some option to quote everything and that would allow commas in the data; i.e. “One, two, and three”,”something else”,”1.320,42”
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 day ago
I’m a web developer that lets people to export to CSV and quoting things is usually the answer. Though for a number with a comma in it I’d rather not quote it and leave it as a bare integer/decimal so that the data type is correctly inferred.
Speaking of, I have a handful of hacks I do specifically for Excel so that it infers types correctly — it needs more prodding than other applications importing CSV.
Yeah, CSV is an archaic data format that lacks a lot of important nuances; like understanding that not everything is done the same way everywhere around the world.
I guess one viable alternative would be to use tabs for delimiting the data, since (afaik) tabs are not commonly found in normal spreadsheet data (I admit that I could be wrong).
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 day ago
I’ve messed with both. But yeah, keeping an international mind is best. Separators are really unnecessary for data transfer so I usually just exclude them.
But yeah, one quirk is for Excel to recognize a date it has to be
YYYY-MM-DD 12:00 PMbecause it doesn’t understand ISO-8601. 😓