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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Addressing CSV import/export in kspread for koffice-1.5
From:       Robert Knight <robertknight () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-02-02 19:34:01
Message-ID: 13ed09c00602021134o60114317o () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi Philippe,

Thanks for offering to help out.  I suspect the reason why KSpread's
CSV support is poor is simply because only a limited amount of work
has been done on it.

Regards,
Robert.

On 02/02/06, Philippe Rigault <prigault@oricom.ca> wrote:
> Dear kspread developers,
>
> The status of Text/CSV import/export in kspread has always been far from
> satisfactory, and keeps many users from using koffice at all. In that regard,
> kspread is neither compatible with OpenOffice.org, MSExcel, not with kspread
> itself.
>
> I would like to help fix this for 1.5 final, which I think is a reasonable
> goal because  few modifications are actually required to make this possible.
> My proposal aims at no less than changing kspread from the worst text/csv
> spreadsheet app (among the Koffice/MS/OO.org trio) to the best one before
> mid-march.
>
> I guess kspread developers are aware of CSV idiosyncrasies (including the fact
> that no standard defines it, that MSExcel itself cannot read/write CSV across
> different locales), so I will not elaborate much here. Suffice is to say that
> the proposed modifications address all current bugs while becoming compatible
> with both OpenOffice.org and MSExcel.
>
> IMPORTANT: these modifications do not introduce new features or translation
> strings, they just fix inconsistent behaviour, so they can happen at this
> feature-frozen stage.
>
> Proposal: help implement the following modifications.
>
> 1. Export
> - Systematically quote all fields,even empty ones
> - Protect quote characters (single or double quote) in every field by
> replacing each quote character by two consecutive quote characters (same
> behaviour as OpenOffice.org and MSExcel).
> - Disallow quotes (both single and double) in Cells -> Delimiter -> Other.
>
> These three modifications combined would actually solve all CSV problems I
> know of currently, including:
>  Bug 109797:    CSV export does not enclose all cells in quotes
>  Bug 95552: Exporting numbers as CSV may turn them into strings
>
> 2. Import
> Parsing a Text/CSV file correctly is more a bit complicated that it may seem
> at first sight, in particular it cannot be done simply by first splitting
> each line with the delimiter character. One needs a real parser with states
> to deal with quote character within fields.
>
> In addition, I would like to help address this bug, which is another reason
> keeping users from koffice.
>  Bug 109847: Kspread cannot open TAB-delimited text files with .xls extension
>
> I would like to get the agreement of the team and then contribute the
> modifications with kspread developers to have them ready for beta2 (which I
> will be able to test at the same time as other packagers).
>
> Let me know how best to achieve this,
>
> Best regards,
>
> Philippe Rigault
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> koffice-devel@kde.org
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>
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