Re: [PHP] Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:35:33AM +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote:

<snip>

> 
> The .csv format is just a plain text format, so you won't get formatting
> or formulas in your 'sheets' (csv is also a sheetless format) but it's
> been used for years by many systems for data.
> 
> A lot of database systems will let you import csv files as well, which
> is quite convenient, although you will have to make sure the csv uses
> commas to delimit the data. Microsoft managed to basterdise this format
> a bit as well, and lets you use tabs, spaces and all sorts of other
> characters to delimit data fields. Someone obviously didn't mention to
> them that the file type is 'comma separated values'!

I process a lot of CSV files, and what I typically see is that Excel
will enclose fields which might contain commas in quotes. This gets
messy. So I finally wrote a C utility which parses the file and yields
tab-delimited records without the quotes.

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster