[sf-perl] writing a csv file: ...

[Earl Ruby]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Rich Morin <rdm at cfcl.com> wrote:
> I looked up XLS in Wikipedia.  The "XML Spreadsheet" example on
> this page immediately demonstrates one (expected) problem: the
> example is about 10x the size of the equivalent CSV.

One of my projects pulls in raw data from several hundred different
sources, some of which are XLS and CSV. If you're pulling data in, as
well as spitting it out, the switch from CSV to XLS is well worth it
just because you can specify the format of XLS data.

e.g. When a customer uses Excel to modify an XLS file containing a
text cell with '1-1', you get '1-1' back. With a CSV, you're more
likely to get 'Jan-1' back as Excel tries to "smart format" the CSV
file. Likewise, if the cell really is a date, an Excel date format
will keep a customer from entering something like "Feb. 30, 2011", and
you'll get data that ParseDate can (usually) handle.

-- 
Earl Ruby
http://earlruby.org/