Re: [Orgmode] Re: [PATCH] quote the real csv separator

[Carsten Dominik]

On Oct 25, 2010, at 10:45 AM, Łukasz Stelmach wrote:

> Bernt Hansen <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Łukasz Stelmach <address@hidden> writes:
> > > Carsten Dominik <address@hidden> writes:
> > > > What use case do you have in mind?
> [...]
> > > My bank lets me download monthly reports as CSV. In fact they let me
> > > choose the separator and the default value is the comma. But I  
> > > choose
> > > '|' because then I can open the csv as org file and just do
> > >
> > > (replace-regexp "^" "|")
> > >
> > > to get a beautiful org-mode table.
> >
> > There is an easier org-mode way I think.  Just get the comma  
> > delimited
> > data into your org file, select the region and C-c | to get your  
> > table.
> >
> > If you are inserting an external file with C-x i <file> RET
> > then C-x C-x marks the region and C-c | converts it to a table.
>
> Cool :-) It works like charm. I'll have to check how to convert  
> decimal
> commas to periods. I still like '|' more for my perl script, though,
> because it's enough to split '\|' and not care about quoted commas.  
> But
> this is my problem.
>
> OK, I won't insist on keeping the patch but I would like to get a
> rationale of :sep parameter in orgtbl-to-generic without a choice of  
> how
> to quote it.

orgtbl-to-generic is, well, very generic.  It is up to the caller that  
when she/he specified :sep, to ensure the the separator does not show  
up in fields, of to specify :fmt in a way that it will take care of  
any necessary quoting.  There is no generic way of quoting, sometimes  
it is prepending a character, bu in other cases something completely  
different might be needed.

> OR, if you think that CSV should stay as it is then I
> suggest such a rewrite:
>
> (defun orgtbl-to-csv (table params)
>  (orgtbl-to-generic table (org-combine-plists
>                            params
>                             '(:sep "," :fmt org-quote-csv-field))))
>
> to make CSV :sep and and :fmt mandatory (that's how this all have  
> starded).

I don't understand, here is the current definition of orgtbl-to-csv:

(defun orgtbl-to-csv (table params)
  "Convert the orgtbl-mode table to CSV material.
This does take care of the proper quoting of fields with comma or  
quotes."
  (orgtbl-to-generic table (org-combine-plists
                            '(:sep "," :fmt org-quote-csv-field)
                            params)))

so these are mandatory.  I guess I do not understand what you are  
saying.

Best wishes

- Carsten