Re: [libreoffice-users] Calc: Text Columns Not Quoted When Saving .csv

Hi :)
My ham-fisted kludge would probably be to save the Csv and then open it in a text-editor, such as 
Kate, Gedit, Notepad or whatever and then do search&replace to look for 
, , 
and replace with 
,  " ",  

Perhaps in Calc add an unusual combination of characters in thse empty cells.  

Actually i have just tried this in Calc and Gnumeric.  Text cells didn't get any " nor ' marks 
around them except cells with just spaces in them and formatted as text but only in Gnumeric, not 
in Calc.  Then i noticed that when you "Save As ..." there is a tick-box to "Edit filter 
preferences" and that gives a pop-up dialogue-box with a tick-box to "Quote all text fields".  Only 
then it starts putting " around spaces and letters.  Empty cells still have nothing.  

Is that something to do with Utf8 coding?
Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Rich Shepard <rshepard@appl-ecosys.com>
> To: users@global.libreoffice.org 
> Sent: Friday, 21 December 2012, 21:52
> Subject: [libreoffice-users] Calc: Text Columns Not Quoted When Saving .csv
>
>   I've been going around in circles on this issue for most of today without
> finding the solution. The context:
>
>     I have several large data files provided in .csv format that need to
> be edited and have column formats made explicit.
>
>     These files are recognized by LO/Calc as spreadsheets when I open
> them and I change the field separator from a tab to a comma. They display
> correctly in the spreadsheet.
>
>     I explicitly format text, integer, and floating point columns by
> highlighting the column(s) and selecting Format -> Cells and selecting the
> appropriate choice.
>
>   The problem comes when I save the explicitly-formatted file: the text
> fields are quoted only when they have content, not when they are blank.
> This, of course, prevents correctly reading the files into database tables
> or R data frames. I have tried all sorts of kludges to force Calc to display
> the .csv dialog box where I can tell it to quote all text fields, but those
> cells without content are saved as ,, rather than ,'',.
>
>   What do I do so that blank cells in text-formatted columns are quoted in
> the saved (or saved-as) .csv file?
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich
>
>
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