Export Tab-Delimited File Inserting Unwanted Quote Marks Around Fields Containing Commas And Other Special Characters

[JDSpearns]

Excel is inserting "unwanted quote marks" around text fields containing commas or other special characters when exporting a file in "tab-delimited" format.

Is there a standard option or something to disable this behaviour without having to write a macro to prevent it?

Thanks.
J. David Spearns
{Email address removed by Admin}
Spam bots routinely troll public forums looking for email addresses to Spam

 

[Joe4]

Welcome to the Board!

Yeah, that is one of those inexplicable little things that Excel does. Usually, it is not a problem because most programs that read in text files can handle text qualifiers. Do you know for a fact that the program you are importing into can't handle them?

You may be able to locate some VBA code to create tab-delimited text files that will avoid this issue.

What other special characters are you talking about?

BTW, I removed your Email Address from your post. It is generally not a good idea to post it in a public forum unless you like getting Spam! If you have the need to share your email address with someone, it is best to do so in a Private Message.

 

[JDSpearns]

Thanks for the quick reply and advice.

A closer look at the data revealed that it was just commas that were triggering this unwanted behaviour and not other characters.

The application that imports this data is a package, although I can strip the unwanted quote marks before or after the import to work around the problem.
It is just that I wish that Excel would not put them there in the first place unless you specifically requested them.

Again, thanks.
J. David Spearns

 

[Joe4]

Yeah, I am not a big fan of how Excel handles text qualifiers and text files. What I really hate is if you open a CSV file directly in Excel, and you have numeric data with text qualifiers (like zip code "01234"), Excel brings them in as numbers and you lose the leading zeroes. Very annoying, you think it should recognize it should be a text field by the qualifiers.

You can get around that by importing the file as text instead of opening directly in Excel, but it is still an annoyance -- especially since Microsoft usually sets Excel as the default program to view CSV files (which you can also manually change).