Keith Medcalf expressed precisely :
Mostly the problems experienced by people is that they make some home-
brew CSV importer that does not realise how to correctly read
output from a standards-based exporter such as Excel, and then try to
change things like separation or quoting methods to "fix" it
after the fact.
Which version of Excel produces standard-compliant CSV exports? As far as I
have ever been able to tell, Excel produces the most broken CSV files to be
found anywhere. Of course, I haven't used any of the
"not-of-my-responsibility or under-my-control" (pronounced "cloud" by the
marketroids) versions, nor anything later than the 2010 versions. Most
software designed to use Excel produced CSV files (or to produce CSV files
for use by Excel) have a "Use Excel Format" to handle Excel's idiosyncrasies.
Generally I agree! The resulting CSV generated by Excel will be
whatever structure the Excel user designed into the worksheet. It's a
given that this will never be consistently correct! (Though this may
accidentally occur from time to time<g>!)
As an Excel developer, I prefer to use standard file I/O functions or
ADODB as relates to the programming language I'm working with to manage
delimited files used for data storage. This can include any delimiter,
not just commas. Also, the file needs to be properly configured as a
datatable as RSmith has outlined. Once the data is read into a
recordset in the programming language then it can be reliably written
to a SQLite db file. I find this is the best approach for reliable
control of the data being put into a new table (or updating an existing
table).
--
Garry
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