Re: More than you ever wanted to know about csv files (Re: to csv or not to csv)

[Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org>]

I did provide advice on what I believe the semi-safe subset of csv is, see
items 1-5 near the end of my message.

There are so many ***conflicting*** csv implementations in the world, that
it is hard to get any closer.  RFC-4180 (which arrived decades later than csv
files) is not particularly helpful -- it partially describes an ideal
not implemented
by anyone.

> To my way of thinking, CSV applies to the middle layer.

Please read "very important note" again.  We cannot have uninterpreted data in a
spreadsheet, so the semantic layer is not optional.

People get extremely emotional about csv files for some reason.   It's
basically "csv files
obviously mean what I think they mean and everyone else is an idiot."
> From a spreadsheet
implementor point of view, the loud and ***conflicting*** demands of
csv users is not worth
the effort.  I have taken a good amount of abuse on that account.

With respect to documentation: maybe.  There are parts of the whole
thing for which I may
change things without notice.  It is by nature a bit of an AI system
that tries to make up for
the lack of semantics in csv files.  A full description would be very
complicated and in
practice worse than useless: it would actively prevent fixing things.

Oh, and I lied: Gnumeric doesn't look at the whole column for clues.
The first line might
contain a header, so it's mostly ignored.

You can file the bugs.  If you want to see what is going on for each,
set GNM_DEBUG=stf.
That gives you a hint or two.

Morten