Re: Imported text is converted to date

[Morten Welinder <mwelinder gmail com>]

> Unfortunately, I believe the configurable text importer also fails in the same way.
> With the attached .csv file I get identical results either by automatic importation
> or by using the configurable text importer (setting " as the text indicator).

The text indicator has nothing to do with this.

On the third page, select "Text" instead of "General".

Morten




On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Rex Couture <rex wustl edu> wrote:
>     Thanks for your helpful comments.  I've looked at the problem some more,
> and I understand it better now.
>
>     Unfortunately, I believe the configurable text importer also fails in
> the same way.  With the attached .csv file I get identical results either by
> automatic importation or by using the configurable text importer (setting "
> as the text indicator).
>
>     I think the .csv specification is not the source of the problem, and
> neither is text importation.  The problem is that Gnumeric always interprets
> a string such as 10.24.2 as a date unless it is preceded by a single quote '
> .  This is true for either manual (keyboard) input or text import.  If I
> enter 10.24.2 into a blank cell, Gnumeric interprets that as a date unless I
> precede it with an apostrophe.  I did not find an actual specification for
> entering dates, but the Help document has many examples, and this format
> (with periods) is not one of them.
>
>     For text import this behavior does not work if a delimiter is intended
> as part of the string.  For example, in the attached .csv file, importing
> the first and second lines fails if commas are intended as part of the
> string.  In the third and fourth lines of the attachment, Gnumeric
> recognizes "10.24.2, 3.7" as a string, but again it interprets "10.24.2" as
> a date (use " as the text indicator).  For my own application I can work
> around it easily, but I didn't find a general workaround.  To import strings
> like that I suppose one could use tab-delimited files, but the undesirable
> effect is that the file import method must depend on the strings.