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

On 12/21/2012 04:52 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   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
Rich,

In a csv file the field delimiter is usually a comma and to denote what 
is a string that may contain a comma quotation marks are used. If the 
cell in the original format was empty or NULL in a database nothing is 
exported. For example the export from a database might look like this:

1,"text string, test",,,"the last two were NULLs in the database",34
2."another string",3,3,,57

For the exported value to an empty string ("") the original value must 
be an empty string "" not an empty cell. When importing into a database 
is it often better to have the equivalent to a NULL value because the 
each column in the database will have an assigned data type and the 
empty string will cause an import error if there is data type mismatch. 
The empty string will cause problems with numeric data.

--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com


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