CSV files opening fine, but are saved as UNICODE files with delimiters changed to tabs.

[Neillsm]

Hullo community,

This is my first post - and I hope that someone can help.

I have a folder full of auto-generated (from a process tool) *.csv files - these have comma delimiters when viewed notepad, are recognised as Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File in windows and open in Excel (2010) with all the columns and rows where you would expect them.

My problems is that when I opened a few to make some edits, then CTRL+S the files saved - it took me a while to realise the "Saving as CSV-formatting will be lost" dialogue never appeared - when I checked the files (still called *.csv, still reporting to be a comma separated file) they opened in Excel as one column of text. A check in notepad showed that the file was flat text with no delimiters.

When I opened another (unedited) *.csv from this folder and chose "Save As" the default option (which should be the original file type) it was wanting to save as UNICODE text.

No other *.csv files exhibit this strange behaviour - only the ones in this folder - created by this tool - The danger is that others will open and save these files and break the delimiters.

Any ideas?

 

[shadow12345]

first guess would be the tool is not creating the csv files correctly... simpliest fix might be to have the developers repair the issue. If thats not possible then maybe you could resolve it yourself.

By that I mean, if you file save as, does it then resolve the issue? If so, perhaps we can create something to resave everything in the folder in a loop?

*If it helps i think this error pops up when you have unsupport special charators like Japaense of tidles from spanish and french....

 

[Neillsm]

first guess would be the tool is not creating the csv files correctly... simpliest fix might be to have the developers repair the issue. If thats not possible then maybe you could resolve it yourself.

By that I mean, if you file save as, does it then resolve the issue? If so, perhaps we can create something to resave everything in the folder in a loop?

*If it helps i think this error pops up when you have unsupport special charators like Japaense of tidles from spanish and french....

Now that last point is an interesting one - The tool that generates the file is from Taiwan. That might be the source of the error.

Thank you.

 

[ww4612]

the problem may caused by using different separator, such as US use "," and UK use ";" to separate column. I recommand you to use notepad (notepad++) to edit any of the CSV file you made. press ctrl+h to repalce all the separator at once

 

[Neillsm]

the problem may caused by using different separator, such as US use "," and UK use ";" to separate column. I recommand you to use notepad (notepad++) to edit any of the CSV file you made. press ctrl+h to repalce all the separator at once

It's definitely not that - The files start out looking like this:

LotNo:,P32102.3_043
Total,6388
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
,Min,Avg,Max,Std,,,,,,,,,
CONTA,0.0,0.000,0.0,0.0,
CONTC,0.0,0.000,0.0,0.0,
POLAR,1.000,1.000,1.000,0.000,
VF1,0.0,0.000,0.0,0.0,
VF2,1.147,2.396,2.439,0.101,

I'm in the UK and I have never seen semi-colon separated files!

 

[ww4612]

i recommend to put the title in the first row and don't leave the first column empty. it seems the system don't understand how many columns you have. your excel file should look like:

	column1	column2	column3	column4
row1	title1	title2	title3	title4
row2	1	10	100	1000
row3	2	20	200	2000
row4	3	30	300	3000

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