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.
'10.24.2, 3.7, 10.24.2.7
'10.24.2, 3.7, 10.24.2.7'
"10.24.2, 3.7"
"10.24.2", 3.7
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