How do I preserve the leading 0 of a number using Unoconv when converting from a .csv file to a .xls file? - csv

I have a 3 column csv file. The 2nd column contains numbers with a leading zero. For example:
044934343
I need to convert a .csv file into a .xls and to do that I'm using the command line tool called 'unoconv'.
It's converting as expected, however when I load up the .xls in Excel instead of showing '04493434', the cell shows '4493434' (the leading 0 has been removed).
I have tried surrounding the number in the .csv file with a single quote and a double quote however the leading 0 is still removed after conversion.
Is there a way to tell unoconv that a particular column should be of a TEXT type? I've tried to read the man page of unocov however the options are little confusing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps I came too late at the scene, but just in case someone is looking for an answer for a similar question this is how to do:
unoconv -i FilterOptions=44,34,76,1,1/1/2/2/3/1 --format xls <csvFileName>
The key here is "1/1/2/2/3/1" part, which tells unoconv that the second column's type should be "TEXT", leaving the first and third as "Standard".
You can find more info here: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Spreadsheets/Filter_Options#Token_7.2C_csv_import
BTW this is my first post here...

Related

Octave - dlmread and csvread convert the first value to zero

When I try to read a csv file in Octave I realize that the very first value from it is converted to zero. I tried both csvread and dlmread and I'm receiving no errors. I am able to open the file in a plain text editor and I can see the correct value there. From what I can tell, there are no funny hidden characters, spacings, or similar in the csv file. Files also contain only numbers. The only thing that I feel might be important is that I have five columns/groups that each have different number of values in them.
I went through the commands' documentation on Octave Forge and I do not know what may be causing this. Does anyone have an idea what I can troubleshoot?
To try to illustrate the issue, if I try to load a file with the contents:
1.1,2.1,3.1,4.1,5.1
,2.2,3.2,4.2,5.2
,2.3,3.3,4.3,
,,3.4,4.4
,,3.5,
Command window will return:
0.0,2.1,3.1,4.1,5.1
,2.2,3.2,4.2,5.2
,2.3,3.3,4.3,
,,3.4,4.4
,,3.5,
( with additional trailing zeros after the decimal point).
Command syntaxes I'm using are:
dt = csvread("FileName.csv")
and
dt = dlmread("FileName.csv",",")
and they both return the same.
Your csv file contains a Byte Order Mark right before the first number. You can confirm this if you open the file in a hex editor, you will see the sequence EF BB BF before the numbers start.
This causes the first entry to be interpreted as a 'string', and since strings are parsed based on whether there are numbers in 'front' of the string sequence, this is parsed as the number zero. (see also this answer for more details on how csv entries are parsed).
In my text editor, if I start at the top left of the file, and press the right arrow key once, you can tell that the cursor hasn't moved (meaning I've just gone over the invisible byte order mark, which takes no visible space). Pressing backspace at this point to delete the byte order mark allows the csv to be read properly. Alternatively, you may have to fix your file in a hex editor, or find some other way to convert it to a proper Ascii file (or UTF without the byte order mark).
Also, it may be worth checking how this file was produced; if you have any control in that process, perhaps you can find why this mark was placed in the first place and prevent it. E.g., if this was exported from Excel, you can choose plain 'csv' format instead of 'utf-8 csv'.
UPDATE
In fact, this issue seems to have already been submitted as a bug and fixed in the development branch of octave. See #58813 :)

xlsread in octave return zero values

I am trying to read a csv file in octave. The file contains a table with both numeric and text data. It also contains information of date and hour. In addition, the first line is in a different format then the rest of the lines since it contains titles.
The csvread can only read numeric data (according to Octave help), so I tried using xlsread as follows:
[NUMARR, TXTARR, RAWARR, LIMITS] = xlsread ('Line.csv')
I get only a matrix of NUMARR with numeric values. However, all other returned variables are empty- their dimension is 0x0.
How do I get all the text and all other information?
TX!
To solve this issue, open your CSV file in Windows notepad and save it as ANSI format instead of UNICODE.

Not able to load CSV file in weka

I am not being able to load csv file using weka, I have removed each and every special symbol even using text editor, still no luck. I am attaching the file, I will be obliged if solve this problem.
It shows "Wrong number of values, Read 31, expected 27, read token[EOL], line 3"
link : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By7zyIPDD6HJMmthWnZLSUk5aFE
You have planty of empty fields in your file and if you download it as .csv even the header gets three commas at its end.
e.g. your 6th line:
,Doug Walker,,,131,,Rob Walker,131,,Documentary,Doug Walker,Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens  ,8,143,,0,,,,,,,,,12,7.1,,0,,,
Simmilar to the suggestion in this post you could try s.th. like notepad++ or another text editor to replace ",," by ",?," to fill up your gaps.
Convert NA values to ? automatically while loading
I did this and then you get in your first row two question marks as column names wich obviously doesnt work, so change the first row to look like this:
color,director_name,num_critic_for_reviews,duration,director_facebook_likes,actor_3_facebook_likes,actor_2_name,actor_1_facebook_likes,gross,genres,actor_1_name,movie_title,num_voted_users,cast_total_facebook_likes,actor_3_name,facenumber_in_poster,plot_keywords,?,num_user_for_reviews,language,country,content_rating,budget,title_year,actor_2_facebook_likes,imdb_score,aspect_ratio,movie_facebook_likes,additionalColName1,additionalColName2,additionalColName3
if you try now to import your data weka starts telling you which lines it doesn't like and why. Btw. you did not "removed each and every special symbol"!
After removing a fiew lines with e.g. the Ç character it worked.
Thats just an ugly workaround, try filling the empty values and find a regular expression or a better way to save your file to remove the last three commas of every line, i was just too lazy for now. But i could load it into weka and that's what you wanted (:

Java.io.IOException: wrong number of values (WEKA CSV to ARFF)

Currently working on a Data Mining project using my own dataset I had found using Weka. The only issue is that taking my file from csv format and converting it into arff format is causing issues.
java.io.IOException: wrong number of values. Read 2, expected 5, Read Token[EOL], line 3
This is the error I am getting. I have browsed around online looking for similar issues and have tried removing all quotes and special characters that throw this exception. Every place I looked told me to remove special characters and I believe there are none left. The link to my dataset is here : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xqEe7MZE9SdKB_yvFSgWeSVYuDrq0b31Eu5oECNbGH0/edit#gid=1736568367&vpid=A1
This is the first three lines of my file where the first is the attribute names, file is separated by commas in note
Inequality Adjusted HPI Rank,Sub Region,Inequality Adjusted Life Expectancy,Inquality Adjusted Well being,Footprint
,Inequality adjusted HPI
1,1,73.1,6.9,2.5,48.2
2,6,65.17333333,5.487667631,1.390974448,45.97489063
If you open your file with a text editor, you will see that Footprint has quotes around it. Delete the quotes and you are good to go!
Weka is normally not that good in reading CSV files that include special characters, and ARFF files are normally easier to use. Therefore, in such cases, the easiest way is to convert your CSV file to an ARFF file using R ("RWeka" and "foreign" libraries can handle this conversion).
There is also another possibility. I was creating my CSV file and the header had a different number of elements compared to the rest of the data. So, check the header as well...!

Remove all binary characters from a file

Occasionally, I have a hard time manipulating data in a CSV file because of the following error.
Binary file (standard input) matches
I researched several articles online but cannot seem to find one that helps me remove all of the binary characters or elements from a CSV file.
Unfortunately, I do not know where to start with this.
If I run the 'file' command on the file, I get the following output:
Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with very long lines, with CRLF, CR line terminators
The second from last line in the file prints as:
"???? ?????, ???? ???",????,"?????, ????",???,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,* Home,email#address.com,,
The second line in the file prints as:
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,* ,email#address.com,,
This file contains too many lines to open in Excel or a GUI, "Save as..." and remove the binary elements that way.
Please help me. Thank you!