Hello Andrew, thank you for your answer.
"Your reply was that you don’t have permission to modify the text." by this I
meant that the data is transferred to me as it is and I can't modify the text
in the source (because someone else is the database admin) but it is possible
for me to modify the text that has been transferred to me. I'm sorry, this was
my mistake in writing my question in an unclear way.
And in the end, I ended up transforming the strings, using str.replace as you
and the comments in Stack Overflow suggested. It worked great!
It is also a good point that I should explain in detail why a module should be
changed, I will definitely think about that later first if I run into another
problem.
I'm still a bit surprised at the negative tone in your reply. I can tell you I
am just a junior developer who started coding full time last summer. The best
way to keep up the positive attitude of a junior is to answer their questions
in a positive and constructive way. From your answer I got the impression that
just because I wrote my question in an unclear way, you think I'm stupid and
asking stupid questions (there are no stupid questions in the world and
everyone has their own pace of learning new things). Even though I had written
my question unclearly, I would have liked a more positive and constructive
reply, because I am willing to learn new things and learn from my mistakes, and
it is not right for anyone to get verbally "punished" for their (human!)
mistakes.
We could also have continued our conversation in a constructive way and learn
that I just wrote an incorrect question! (example: you could also have asked "I
did not understand, did you mean this by your question?" --> I say "No I'm
sorry, I wrote my question in an unclear way, I actually meant...")
Moreover, how could I know which is the best and right answer if I don't ask
first? It is not for granted that a junior knows exactly what he or she should
do / what is the most efficient way / what are the capabilities and
restrictions of the csv module, and that is why we are asking questions. Yes, I
know it is frustrating to answer "stupid" questions because seniors have been
dealing with the issues several more years than juniors and these kind of
things are for granted for seniors. But juniors (and all humans) learn slowly,
they need time to repeat their successes and most importantly, mistakes, to
learn new skills. Making mistakes is not stupid, it is human, and it is needed
for learning new things.
(N.B. I have also seen this kind of negative reply culture before in the whole
Stack Overflow community, which makes me a bit sad. Is it because many
programmers are engineers? I have noticed this kind of behavior in the
engineering student / tech community too: always looking for answers for every
problem, always thinking their own solution is the best one, no matter what the
situation, often forgetting the manners or that we all are humans, after all,
and some are just learning new things out of curiosity. I'm an engineer/former
tech student myself.)
I hope you will think about what I wrote in the third paragraph. You will have
much more success if you shape your answers in a positive and constructive way
and leave negative things behind. I have observed this in every learning
situation I have been in and the best results have been in the positive
communities where I get positive and constructive feedback.
Kind regards
- Aleksi
________________________________
From: Andrew Barnert <abarn...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2020 7:41 PM
To: allu.matikai...@hotmail.com <allu.matikai...@hotmail.com>
Cc: python-ideas@python.org <python-ideas@python.org>
Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] CSV Dictwriter - Handling escape characters
On Feb 12, 2020, at 06:11, allu.matikai...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> I would like if the DictWriter would be able to write escape characters (\n
> and \r and their combinations such as \n\n\n and \r\n) as literal characters.
I don’t think you’re asking to write escape sequences, but how to write actual
newline and carriage return characters by escaping them. Thats what the strings
in your example post text have, at least. In a string literal, "a\nb" is the
three characters a, newline, b; the string literal "a\\nb" is the four
character a, backslash, n, b In your comments, you seem to have a lot of
confusion about the difference between Python string literals, JSON string
encodings, and the underlying strings, so it’s hard to be sure, but I’m about
90% sure that your actual strings have newlines, not backslash-escaped newlines.
But regardless of what you actually have, there’s no reason the csv module
should be changed to help you with this. It’s meant to write data in the same
language used by Excel (or some other known CSV dialect). There is no backslash
escaping of control characters in Excel—as is obvious from the fact that Excel
shows a \n as literally a backslash and an n rather than a newline within the
cell. If there’s some other CSV dialect that does use backslash escaping that
you want to support, that would be different—but you’re trying to use Excel, so
that can’t be the issue. The csv module doesn’t help you do web percent
encoding or rot13 encryption or reversing every other string because those are
meaningless to Excel and other CSV dialects, and the same is true here.
But that’s fine. You can already arbitrarily transform strings in Python,
before passing them to the csv module. For example, instead of
`c.writerow(row)` you can do `c.writerow(map(transformer, row))`, and you’re
done. That transformer could be an existing escaping function that means
exactly what you want, or you could write it yourself as a one-liner (`return
value.replace('\r', '\\r').replace('\n<file://\\r').replace('\n>', '\\n')`).
Also, even if you disagree and think the csv module does need to change, you
need to explain what that change is. Would you add a new Dialect attribute?
What would it be? Would it share the same escapechar used for escaping quotes,
or have a different attribute, or be hardcoded to backslash? And so on.
> I asked a question about this on Stack Overflow but have had no good answers
> yet.
You got comments telling you to use str.replace to modify the strings as you
read them or as you write them. Which is the right answer. Your reply was that
you don’t have permission to modify the text. So you’re asking for is a way to
modify the text without modifying the text, which is obviously impossible. If
that’s true, then even if Python 3.9 added your requested feature and you
waited until it came out before continuing your project, you still wouldn’t be
able to use it, because if you don’t have permission to replace newlines with
\n escapes then you don’t have permission to ask the csv module to do it
either. So no wonder you haven’t gotten any good answers. If you asked how to
encode some text in UTF-16 and then said you don’t have permission to encode
the text, you’d get the same result—either no answers, or bad answers from
people who don’t know anything but are desperate for points so they just guess
wildly at something that might be kind of similar to what you want.
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