On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 11:49 AM, Paul Gilmartin < [email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 09:01:53 -0600, Bill Woodger wrote: > > >The only real problem with delimiters is when the delimiter can occur in > the data. Often a good reason for avoiding commas. Tab can be good, as long > as the data cannot contain tab (unlikely for Mainframe data). > > > >Delimiters in the data can be "protected" by enclosing the data of that > field in double-quotes. This is only a genuine problem when the the "other > end" can only process text-and-control-codes and when "any value is > possible in the data". However, it can also be an issue due to "diktat" - > "this delimiter must be used, otherwise the world will stop revolving". > That's bad when the delimiter can appear in the data. > > > Monthly, another department publishes a .xlsx file which I wish to parse > with a script. I open it with LibreOffice and export as .html and parse > that with my script. (Ugh! The hard part is process documentation of > the manual process.) No problem with dodging delimiters. .xml might > be a better choice than .html, but I knew I was familiar with .html. > > WTF!? Xcel can't export as .xml!? > I guess that I'm the one who said that. Turns out, in the current Office360 version, it _supposedly_ can. I say supposedly because it give an error msg: Does not contain XML mappings. So, I guess it needs to be specially formatted. In my particular case, if I needed to do this, I'd use the R language along with the XLConnect package to read the spreadsheet. > > --gil > > -- Heisenberg may have been here. Unicode: http://xkcd.com/1726/ Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
