Re: "comma-delimited" format for data files

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Article #41411

#41411

From: warren Warren Harrison
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1990 17:56

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In article <2926@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
>In article <3008@infmx.UUCP>, aland@infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes:
>> I have heard the above term thrown around but can't find any hard info
>> on it.  I gather that the protocol is that all fields are delimited by
>> commas and that all character fields are enclosed in (double) quotes.
>
>Character fields only need to be enclosed in double quotes if they
>contains commas themselves.

The most popular reason for using comma-delimited fields under MS-DOS is
for importing into Lotus or dBASE. I'm not sure with dBASE, but with Lotus,
things to be taken as labels (ie, non-numerics) must be enclosed in quotes
even if they don't contain commas or quotes themselves (at least my version
of Quattro will ignore thm if they're not quoted and I assume it acts like
Lotus in this respect).

==========================================================================
Warren Harrison                                          warren@cs.pdx.edu
Department of Computer Science                                503/725-3108
Portland State University

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!psueea!!warren
From: warren@.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: "comma-delimited" format for data files
Message-ID: <2207@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jan 90 17:56:55 GMT
References: <3008@infmx.UUCP> <2926@optilink.UUCP>
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Keywords: comma comma down doobie do down down, comma comma

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