what do you think about write.table(... qmethod = "excel")?
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
Last week one of our clients reported trouble with a csv file I generated with write.table. He said that columns with quotes for character variables were rejected by their data importer, which was revised to match the way Microsoft Excel uses quotation marks in character variables. I explained to them that quoted character variables are virtuous and wise, of course, but they say Microsoft Excel CSV export no longer quotes characters unless they include commas in the values. They showed me a CSV file from Excel that looked like this x1,x2,x3,x4 5 6 fred,barney,betty,x bambam,"fred,wilma",pebbles,y Note how the quotes only happen on row 2 column 2. I was surprised it did that, but now I have some pressure to write a csv maker that has that structure.
I think you should resist that pressure. It really makes no sense to write a .csv parser that _only_ supports .csv files created by Excel. If you're going to use Excel as a model, a more sensible approach would be to write a csv parser that supports all the formats that Excel itself supports; Excel of course has no problem importing "x1","x2","x3","x4" "fred","barney","betty","x" "bambam","fred,wilma","pebbles","y" So, seriously, tell them to just fix their csv parser. Since they seem hung up on Excel, it may help to point out that it does in fact import csv produced by write.csv without complaint. Best, Ista Its weird, even when there are spaces in values there
are no quotation marks. Has anybody done this and verified that it matches CSV from MS Excel? If I succeed will you consider a patch? pj -- Paul E. Johnson http://pj.freefaculty.org Director, Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis http://crmda.ku.edu To write to me directly, please address me at pauljohn at ku.edu.
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