[Python-Dev] CSV, bytes and encodings (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Thu Apr 2 07:27:05 CEST 2009

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 at 07:23, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Le mercredi 01 avril 2009 à 18:22 -0400, R. David Murray a écrit :

I just added some tests to trunk that seem to indicate this case is handled correctly in terms of preserving the data. Maybe you didn't write the file such that the fields with the newlines were quoted? I used the default csv.writer into a StringIO, and the whole was then returned as the response of an HTTP request (with the proper Content-Type and Content-Disposition headers). I assume quoting is enabled by default?

Yes, it is. The files I've encountered that had embedded newlines I never tried to open in Excel or any other spreadsheet, so all I'm sure of is that Excel produces them.

And of course how non-Excel applications handle that data on import can be different from how Excel handles it. Of course, but when three major spreadsheet software (including Excel itself) choke on the embedded newline, there might be a problem (or not :)). (please note that as for Excel I couldn't test myself, a client of mine did)

I've made a note to test this, out of curiosity, when I get home.

--David

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