My definition (below) of CSV is from 80's so please forgive me if it doesn’t align with today's (from the Redmond Mafia perspective ... might as well include Lotus Development Corp in cahoots but I think CSV pre-dates them).
- Individual field separated by a single comma without any white space in front or after it. - Numeric values made up of decimal numeral(s), one decimal point -- if required -- and leading (optional) plus or minus sign -- if required -- WITHOUT quotes. - All text that is not numeric double quoted with leading and ending quote. This is how I have remembered to manipulate CSV in many different programming languages (going back to days of BASIC on Commodore PET, to LISP, For-tran, Pascal on PDP-11 to modern days of Ruby and Python on x86) far as I can recall. -----Original Message----- From: Patrick James <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, January 12, 2026 3:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [GNC] report of investment income and capital gains (realized and unrealized) for the previous year I'm also running into a problem that I associate with the Redmond Mafia. After much experimenting, and carefully examining the output of a couple different spreadsheets, I have found that GnuCash does not accept the standard spreadsheet CSV export. From my basic research, it's the Redmond Mafia that set the 'standard' for the way that spreadsheets format the CSV export (overall an unverified claim--I would need to do much more research to properly support this, but all roads seemed to point to Redmond). Using the term 'standard' with CSV is always challenging. About a week ago I made two comments in Bug 798479. This was about double quotes that I seem to always have problems with. I believe I have identified the issue. Also at this point because of the specificity and nature, I'm thinking that a new bug report/RFE is the way to go. I have not verified if the comma problem below, but it is similar to the problems that I'm experiencing. I will, however, do some experimenting with the CSV import of commas as thousands separators. Hopefully I'll get my CSV bug report/RFE written up in the next week or so. > On 01/12/2026 2:26 AM PST rsbrux via gnucash-user <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Many thanks for all the suggestions! > Unfortunately, Excel no longer offers a choice of delimiters when > exporting or saving as CSV. > Since the HTML files contain commas as thousands separators, I would > first have to scrub all the commas for this to work, which isn't easy, > because HTML notation makes liberal use of commas. > LibreOffice Calc does offer a choice of delimiters, but the presence > of the thousands separators still interferes with recognizing numbers. > The problem with accented characters can be blamed on GnuCash. Even > when the reports are displayed within GnuCash, accented characters > like "é" and "ü", which display correctly in the GnuCash UI, are > displayed as "??" in the report. > With all of the manual work this would seem to call for, I wonder if > I might still be better off writing a custom report. If so should I > use the existing Advanced Portfolio source as a starting point, or > would there be an easier way? Any further suggestions or tips about > creating and deploying custom reports would be welcome! > _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
