Support for separator declaration (used by Excel)

[thunfischbrot]

In order to get Excel to always accept CSV files some of our legacy lab equipment adds a line such as

sep=,

as a first line. Trying to manipulate them, e.g. with csvtk transpose results in

[ERRO] read .\Testing.csv: The handle is invalid.

Would you consider catching this line, ignoring it and adding it to the resulting file if present? Could very well be a command-line option as well.

[shenwei356]

Does Excel support this format with leading line seq=,? Is this common?

It's not hard not implement, but still take some time.

[shenwei356]

I get it. It's a EXCEL specific feature. I'll add a global flag --excel to support this.

• http://superuser.com/questions/773644/what-is-the-sep-metadata-you-can-add-to-csvs
• http://superuser.com/questions/407082/easiest-way-to-open-csv-with-commas-in-excel/

[thunfischbrot]

That would be amazing. Thank you for considering it!

[shenwei356]

I've added seamless support for data with meta line of separator declaration used by MS Excel.

See this pre-release, please download and try it. Any feedback is welcome.

Enjoy it!

[thunfischbrot]

That's great! Tested it, it works for reading files with the separator line and writing the separator line into the resulting csv. Curiously though when using a file with separator it does not transpose larger files completely:
Screenshot

Here are the test files if you'd like to try them:
https://we.tl/WnLhln5lHC

Thank you for your effort, this is going to save quite some time over the coming years!

[shenwei356]

Fixed it in https://github.com/shenwei356/csvtk/releases/

Please test it.

[thunfischbrot]

Tested. Works well on small and large files.

Incredible turn-around time. Thank you so much!

[shenwei356]

Well, I just released the v0.7.0-dev2. Make sure it's the version you tested.

Formal version will be released only after add functional tests.

[thunfischbrot]

Was testing v0.7.0-dev1. Now downloaded v0.7.0-dev2, also works as advertised!