I try to import some large csv dataset into neo4j using the neo4j-import tool. Quotation is not used anywhere, and therefore i get errors when parsing using --quote " --quote ' --quote ´ and alike. even choosing very rare unicode chars doesnt help with this multi-gig csv because it also contains arabic letters, math symbols and everything you can imagine.
So: Is there a way to disable the quotation checking completely?
Perhaps it would be useful to have the import tool able to accept character configuration values specifying ASCII codes. If so then you could specify --quote \0 and no character would match. That would also be useful for specifying other special characters in general I'd guess.
You need to make sure the CSV file uses quotation marks, since they allow the tool to reliably determine when strings end.
Any string in your data file might contain the delimiter character (a comma, by default). Even if there were a way to turn off quotation checking, the tool would treat every delimiter character as the end of a field. Therefore, any string field that happened to contain the delimiter character would be terminated prematurely, causing errors.
There are html equivalents for ">" and "<" ("<" and ">") in the OBX-5 field which is causing the Terser.get(..) method to only fetch the characters up to the ampersand character. The encoding characters in MSH-2 are "^~\&". Is the terser.get(..) failing because there's an encoding character in the OBX-5 field? Is there a way to change these characters to ">" and "<" easily?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Yes, it fails because the ampersand has been declared as subcomponent separator and the message you are trying to process is not valid -- it should not contain (unescaped) html character entities (< and >).
If you cannot help how the incoming messages are encoded you should preprocess the message before giving it to terser, replacing illegal characters. I'm pretty sure HAPI cannot help you there.
In a valid HL7v2 message, the data type used in OBX-5 is determined by OBX-2. OBX-5 should only contain the characters and escape sequences allowed by declared data type. < and > are among them (if not declared as separators in MSH-2).
HL7 standtard defines escape sequences for the separator and delimiter characters (e.g. \T\ is the escape sequence for subcomponent separator).
Why doesn't JSON data support special characters?
If json data includes special characters, etc:\r,/,\b,\t, you must transfer them, but why?
JSON supports all Unicode characters in strings. What do you mean by "transferring"?
Those characters need to be escaped because JSON specification says so. For some characters reasons is simple -- for example, double-quotes need to be escaped because regular double-quote ends String value, so there would be no way to tell end marker for character in content. For linefeeds reason probably was to enforce limitation that no String value spans multiple text lines; and for other control-character to avoid "invisible characters". This is similar to escaping required by XML or CSV; all textual data formats require escaping, or prohibit use of certain characters.
I've got a two column CSV with a name and a number. Some people's name use commas, for example Joe Blow, CFA. This comma breaks the CSV format, since it's interpreted as a new column.
I've read up and the most common prescription seems to be replacing that character, or replacing the delimiter, with a new value (e.g. this|that|the, other).
I'd really like to keep the comma separator (I know excel supports other delimiters but other interpreters may not). I'd also like to keep the comma in the name, as Joe Blow| CFA looks pretty silly.
Is there a way to include commas in CSV columns without breaking the formatting, for example by escaping them?
To encode a field containing comma (,) or double-quote (") characters, enclose the field in double-quotes:
field1,"field, 2",field3, ...
Literal double-quote characters are typically represented by a pair of double-quotes (""). For example, a field exclusively containing one double-quote character is encoded as """".
For example:
Sheet: |Hello, World!|You "matter" to us.|
CSV: "Hello, World!","You ""matter"" to us."
More examples (sheet → csv):
regular_value → regular_value
Fresh, brown "eggs" → "Fresh, brown ""eggs"""
" → """"
"," → ""","""
,,," → ",,,"""
,"", → ","""","
""" → """"""""
See wikipedia.
I found that some applications like Numbers in Mac ignore the double quote if there is space before it.
a, "b,c" doesn't work while a,"b,c" works.
The problem with the CSV format, is there's not one spec, there are several accepted methods, with no way of distinguishing which should be used (for generate/interpret). I discussed all the methods to escape characters (newlines in that case, but same basic premise) in another post. Basically it comes down to using a CSV generation/escaping process for the intended users, and hoping the rest don't mind.
Reference spec document.
If you want to make that you said, you can use quotes. Something like this
$name = "Joe Blow, CFA.";
$arr[] = "\"".$name."\"";
so now, you can use comma in your name variable.
You need to quote that values.
Here is a more detailed spec.
In addition to the points in other answers: one thing to note if you are using quotes in Excel is the placement of your spaces. If you have a line of code like this:
print '%s, "%s", "%s", "%s"' % (value_1, value_2, value_3, value_4)
Excel will treat the initial quote as a literal quote instead of using it to escape commas. Your code will need to change to
print '%s,"%s","%s","%s"' % (value_1, value_2, value_3, value_4)
It was this subtlety that brought me here.
You can use Template literals (Template strings)
e.g -
`"${item}"`
CSV files can actually be formatted using different delimiters, comma is just the default.
You can use the sep flag to specify the delimiter you want for your CSV file.
Just add the line sep=; as the very first line in your CSV file, that is if you want your delimiter to be semi-colon. You can change it to any other character.
This isn't a perfect solution, but you can just replace all uses of commas with ‚ or a lower quote. It looks very very similar to a comma and will visually serve the same purpose. No quotes are required
in JS this would be
stringVal.replaceAll(',', '‚')
You will need to be super careful of cases where you need to directly compare that data though
Depending on your language, there may be a to_json method available. That will escape many things that break CSVs.
I faced the same problem and quoting the , did not help. Eventually, I replaced the , with +, finished the processing, saved the output into an outfile and replaced the + with ,. This may seem ugly but it worked for me.
May not be what is needed here but it's a very old question and the answer may help others. A tip I find useful with importing into Excel with a different separator is to open the file in a text editor and add a first line like:
sep=|
where | is the separator you wish Excel to use.
Alternatively you can change the default separator in Windows but a bit long-winded:
Control Panel>Clock & region>Region>Formats>Additional>Numbers>List separator [change from comma to your preferred alternative]. That means Excel will also default to exporting CSVs using the chosen separator.
You could encode your values, for example in PHP base64_encode($str) / base64_decode($str)
IMO this is simpler than doubling up quotes, etc.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base64-encode.php
The encoded values will never contain a comma so every comma in your CSV will be a separator.
You can use the Text_Qualifier field in your Flat file connection manager to as ". This should wrap your data in quotes and only separate by commas which are outside the quotes.
First, if item value has double quote character ("), replace with 2 double quote character ("")
item = item.ToString().Replace("""", """""")
Finally, wrap item value:
ON LEFT: With double quote character (")
ON RIGHT: With double quote character (") and comma character (,)
csv += """" & item.ToString() & ""","
Double quotes not worked for me, it worked for me \". If you want to place a double quotes as example you can set \"\".
You can build formulas, as example:
fprintf(strout, "\"=if(C3=1,\"\"\"\",B3)\"\n");
will write in csv:
=IF(C3=1,"",B3)
A C# method for escaping delimiter characters and quotes in column text. It should be all you need to ensure your csv is not mangled.
private string EscapeDelimiter(string field)
{
if (field.Contains(yourEscapeCharacter))
{
field = field.Replace("\"", "\"\"");
field = $"\"{field}\"";
}
return field;
}
I need my program to have two enclosed characters. My strings in my file can be enclosed by either single quotes or double quotes. How may I manage that?
Not sure this is The Answer... but I'd run it through sed to replace all the double quotes to single (or the other way around). You need to keep in mind escaping when writing your regex, though.
Is it a csv or delimited file? You can pick a delimiter and not worry about string enclosures (so long as the strings don't contain the delimiters).