Yenya's World

Tue, 18 Jul 2006

Comma-Separated Values?

While migrating IS MU to UTF-8, I rewrote the code for exporting tabular data to CSV file for MS Excel, factoring it out to a separate module. When I was at it, I have also added the Content-Disposition header, so that the exported file is saved under a sane filename, instead of the default of some_application.pl. So now the Excel exports are saved as files ending with the .csv suffix. Which is, interestingly enough, the source of problems and incompatibilities with MS Excel.

As I have verified, when I save the CSV file as file.pl, excel reads it correctly - it asks whether the TAB character is the field separator (indeed it is), whether Windows-1250 is the file encoding (it is), and happily imports the file. When the same file is named file.csv, Excel opens it without any question, but somehow does not recognize the TAB character as the field separator. So all the fields are merged to the first column, and the TAB characters are displayed as those ugly rectangles.

When I try to separate the fileds with semicolons, Excel happily opens the file (when named as *.csv), but with another file name, it is necessary to explicitly choose the semicolon as a separator. Just another example of MS stupidity - why the separator cannot be the same regardless of the file name? And by the way, what does CSV stand for? Comma-separated values? Colon-separated values? It does not work for commas nor colons. Just semicolons are detected correctly. Maybe it is some kind of newspeak invented by Microsoft.

I guess I keep the exports TAB-delimited, and just change the file name in the Content-Disposition header to use the .txt extension instead (altough something like .its_csv_you_stupid_excel would probably be more appropriate).

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