Re: [GNC] Bugzilla account request

David,

I think this posting has an example of Tom's issue ?
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2026-June/120813.html

Cheers David H.


On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 at 18:14, David Cousens <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Tom,
>
> I've just had a quick look at the code for parsing the csv input in
> GnuCash. It uses the C++ boost library tokenizer method  to break up an
> input CSV line into the fields. The boost tokenizer  apparently doesn't
> handle backslashes or double quotes well so GnuCash does a bit of
> preprocessing on the line before passing it to the boost tokenizer.
> That preprocessing for backslashes consists of if a single backslash
> occurs in the input line it makes it a double backslash by inserting
> another backslash following it unless the following character is
> already a backslash as the standard C++ string processing used in
> boost's tokenizer requires backslashes to be escaped to be interpreted
> as a backslash within the token.
>
> I'm currently locked out of bugzilla with I think an expired password
> as its been a few years since I accessed it so I can't access any bug
> reports there until I am granted access again. If you can send me an
> example of a BoA line which is causing the problem Imay be able to work
> out what the problem is.
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2026-06-08 at 09:31 -0400, Tom Teixeira wrote:
> > If you do a web search for csv files and backslash, you will see that
> > this has been a contentious issue for many software products, with
> > many
> > telling their users that they _have_ to preprocess the input if they
> > want backslash to appear in any location in a data field. Others --
> > like
> > Microsoft Excel -- never give special treatment to backslash and have
> > no
> > option to do so.
> >
> > A solution I would be happy with is something that disabled special
> > handling for backslash. I don't know whether being able to choose a
> > different escape character. A quick google search says "For more
> > specific configurations, tools like the Python CSV module allow you
> > to
> > manually define any character as the quotechar or escapechar
> > depending
> > on your data needs." The boost library that Gnucash uses does allow
> > specifying zero or more characters to treat as escape characters.
> >
> > On 6/8/26 6:59 AM, Fred Bone wrote:
> > > On 08 June 2026 at 6:32, Tom Teixeira said:
> > >
> > > > And I repeat that the file produced by BoA is read as is by
> > > > Microsoft
> > > > Excel and LibreOffice and many other popular spreadsheet
> > > > programs, without
> > > > preprocessing.
> > > The question is, read how?
> > >
> > > When I save the 3 sample lines verbatim into a file with filetype
> > > ".csv",
> > > and open it in LibreOffice, the result is that the backslashes are
> > > read
> > > verbatim. So it is NOT treating them as escape characters.
> > >
> > > An old copy of Lotus 1-2-3 does the same.
> > >
> > > Google Sheets does the same if I "upload" the same file.
> > >
> > > I don't have "many other popular spreadsheet programs" to test
> > > with.
> > >
> > > Gnucash appears to treat backslashes unconditionally as escape
> > > characters, which it seems to me is the source of the problem. On
> > > the
> > > other hand, reportedly other data sources do use backslashes as
> > > escapes
> > > (which is presumably why Gnucash so treats them).
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> --
> David Cousens
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