[chirp_users] New probably rheas of CSV

[Tom Hayward]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 10:41 AM, Bryan McWhirt <bryan at kb9yen.com> wrote:
> Ahh the pitfalls of using an archaic mailing list instead of a forum, no
> ability to search old posts effectively.

Google does a pretty good job indexing the mailing lists. I find their
search engine works better than any forum search feature.

> I'm having an issue with CSV import. It seems that Chirp is using it's
> own interpretation.
>
> 1. Open Office and Excel both save CSV in formats that can not be
> imported which is not Chirps fault but I still have to deal with it. So,
> is there a list of settings and character encoding that actually work
> when saving from Open Office Calc?
>
> 2. Chirp seems to break the RFC 4180 (
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 ) for CSV in that if you quote the
> header fields it breaks. Does that need to be reported as a bug?

Yes, this is a regression, sorry. Chirp uses signatures found in files
to identify the file type. When I added support for reading CSV files
generated by various programming software, I changed Chirp-style CSV
to be identified with this logic:

filename.endswith(".csv") and filedata.startswith("Location,")

This is done on raw files, before any CSV parsing, so it doesn't catch
CSV variations such as quoted fields or semicolon field separators. It
literally only matches "Location,". It was done this way to make file
type detection very fast. Report a bug and I'll see what I can do
about increasing the scope of things that are detected as CSV files.

http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/repository/revisions/0a688afaca61/diff/chirp/generic_csv.py

> This is what I'm doing that I cannot seem to get to work.  I have a Calc
> document with the repeaters for the state of Indiana. I export a chirp
> file to csv and open that in calc as explained here:
> http://chirp.danplanet.com/issues/1251  Then I just copy and paste the
> fields into the chirp csv file and save. I get the no channels found error.

A sample of the CSV you're having trouble with would be helpful. It's
hard to see the problem without seeing the problem.

Tom KD7LXL