[Kmymoney-devel] Is the new CSV importer working correctly?

[Jack]

On 2011.11.29 10:03, David Houlden wrote:
> Hi,
> I downloaded a csv bank statement from my bank today and ran it  
> through the
> new CSV importer. I found one problem which is maybe a little unusual  
> and is
> down to the way my bank formatted the file. I have attached an  
> editted version
> of the file which contains the first record showing the headers and  
> the data
> record which caused a problem.
> 
> The 5th field on the record in question is the Transaction  
> Description and it
> contains a comma. That part of the field is however contained within  
> double
> quote characters. The unusual feature is that only part of the field  
> is
> contained in double quotes. The back end (which doesn't contain a  
> comma) is
> not. Importing this file confuses the CSV importer and results in the  
> whole of
> the record from the Transaction Description onwards being put into the
> Transaction Description field even though there are other fields  
> delimited by
> comma.
> 
> I appreciate that this may be unusual data but I would expect that  
> each record
> should be broken into fields using the field delimiter but ignoring  
> any field
> delimiters which are contained within double quotes (the text  
> delimiter).
> Indeed, this file imports as I would expect into LibreOffice Calc.
> 
> If required I will raise a bug report for this.

Personally, I would say it is just lucky that LO imports this  
correctly.  In a delimited file, you should have only one value between  
a pair of delimiters, and if it is a text field containing the  
delimiter, it (the entire value) needs to be quoted.  Quoting only part  
of a field doesn't make any sense.  Unfortunately, it's not clear to me  
that the little that passes for a standard here sufficiently addresses  
this issue.  (See  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values).  I suspect the  
issue for the author of the plugin will be how flexible are the  
routines used that actually parse the file.

Jack