[sf-perl] writing a csv file: how do i embed a newline in a cell?
David Alban
extasia at extasia.org
Fri Apr 8 17:44:45 PDT 2011
greetings,
i'm writing a program that will produce a csv file so that folks can
import the output into an ms excel spreadsheet. i want to be able to
write newlines that show up inside individual cells. i created a new
spreadsheet with a single cell, with newlines inserted inside the cell
using alt-enter, so that it looked like the following, and saved it as
a csv file.
a
b
c
d
using cygwin, i see:
$ cat junk.csv
"a
b
c
d"
$ od -c junk.csv
0000000 " a \n b \n c \n d " \r \n
0000013
oh, ok, i need to quote the cell and use newlines. great. but when i
import that back into excel, specifying delimited text and accepting
the tab character as delimiter, i get four cells one in the same
column, the last cell containing the trailing double quote:
a
b
c
d"
wtf?
i also tried using perl to create the file with only newlines,
newlines and carriage returns, and only carriage returns, double
quoting what should be in a single cell. nothing i tried resulted in
a newline inside a cell. any ideas? the data will all be simple text
with the exception that i'd like to insert newlines inside of cells.
thanks,
david
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