2009/3/24 Philip Newton <[email protected]>: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 12:43, Mads Ruben Rennemo <[email protected]> wrote: >> Where the HELL did 42853 come from anyways? > > Honest question? (Fractional) days since the Excel epoch IIRC.
Excel Windows epoch. :-) (It was different on a Mac) >> Also, when I save you as a CSV, I expect a line break inside a cell to >> be removed or converted. I don't expect to see two 8-column lines in >> my 16-column CSV file. > > I think the main hate is considering "CSV" to have exactly one > referent... everyone bakes their own little soup. Yeah, there is no standard definition, but excel's is definitely one of the more hateful. > In Excel's little sub-dialect, for example, quotation marks around a > field escape not only the field delimiter but also the record > delimiter. > > Another fun little hateful fact about Excel is that CSV is really > "locale-specific list separator separated values"; for example, in > Germany, this means semicolon-separated values. But the files still > have a CSV ending. And probably can't be read by US Excel. (Especially > since they'll also use decimal-comma instead of decimal-point.) Whee. Using TSV mostly avoids these problems afaik. Not all obviously. But the one that *really* got me is that they localize macro names! IF() becomes WENN()! Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
