CSV catalog still fails

[Kees44]

I tried all to get a good csv catalog.
One that can be converted (data to colums) in a xls-file.
Title, Author, ISBN, Publisher.
Author (put first in csv) gets NO quotes.
Must be a bug! How/where to report?

Better still would be: Choice of delimiting character when exporting.

And also: Accented characters that are shown correctly in Calibre, show up as 'strange' character-combinations in the csv.
Something wrong with choice of character sets...
Tried everything to convert back; via MSWord, texteditors, no luck.

Suggestions here?

[kovidgoyal]

Quotes are only needed if the field contains a comma. The file is encoded in UTF-8. Tell whatever program you are using it to open it in UTF-8.

[Kees44]

Kovidgoyal,
Just updated to 8.0.34.
I chose export fields: Author-sort; Title; Publisher; ISBN. (Tried also the no-sort field)
Author-sort comes out first in the CSV, but without quotes (" 's).
This field containes many comma's :-(
Other 3 fields are in quotes.

I use MS-Excel 2002/2003 to import the CSV , to split the fields to columns ("Data to columns") and save in XLS format.

I can specify any printable character, or a tab, in MS-Excel to look for as a delimiter.
So if I could tell Calibre to use a # or ^ or < or ... as delimiter, that would solve the problem.
But I suspect a (simple?!?) omission in Calibre, not putting the first field in quotes.
BTW the first record in the CSV, the header, has no quotes at all.
I have found no way in Excel to convert UTF8 to "normal(?)"
e.g "é" comes out for "é"

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Stop press <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>> SORRY <<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>SORRY<<<<<<<<

Just thought of pgm texteditor EditPad: Has Unicode (and more) conversions.
Tried it while making this message.
Turns out: CSV of Calibre HAS quotes around first fields of records
Apparently (stupid) MS-Excel strips those first pair of quotes (why)?!?!
Making it impossible to correctly divide the fields of the records further into cells.
[And: Editpad interprets UTF-8 correctly.]

So - for other readers with MS-Excel - summary:
Calibre export to CSV ("Create catalog ...")
Open CSV in Teksteditor.
Select All in texteditor; Copy.
Open empty Excel-sheet; First cell; Paste.
Then "Text to columns" with " (quote) as delimiter.
[remove columns with , (comma) in them]

See screenshots to clarify my text.
Kovidgoyal, sorry long message, first part WRONG.
I let it in to show you how wrong users can be. Shame on us.
GREAT program, me new user, will be donating, soon as I finish trying out !
btw: delimiter of choice in CSV export still a wish
Thanks

[Kees44]

Kovidgoyal,

My suggestion:
Write in your/Grikers sticky "Creating Catalogs: Start here"
thread as an extra that CSV's are incorrectly handled by MS-Excel.
It strips the first pair of Quotes ("...")

I saw more people like me blaming the Calibre export function.

So: first copy-paste the CSV to a texteditor.
Then Copy-paste the texteditor content to Excel.

Greets, Kees.

[kovidgoyal]

Added under known issues.

[koland]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Added under known issues.

Kovid,

Can you work on the export to CSV? I've tried several of the latest versions (.20 now on .24, I think) and they all skip the title and title_sort, naming the author field as "author_sort" when imported into a spreadsheet (I can't see anything before "author_sort" in notepad. The title is never exported in the body, either.

I need a searchable format that I can easily use with one line/book - CSV would be ideal, as I can read it in notepad, a spreadsheet, create a PDF, etc, but I can't get it to work. I thought I might be able to get around with with XML, opening in a browser and creating a PDF (not ideal, but doable), but all it does is open a notepad like view of it - can't get it into Open Office calc, either (just write, which is beyond useless).

As a possible future improvement - I'd love to be able to drag the fields around and have them create the file in the order I want, rather than the order listed in the database file.

[kovidgoyal]

I dont see this behavior. You need to make sure your import program knows that the csv file is UTF-8 encoded.

[koland]

I'm just looking at it in notepad. I've also pulled it into OpenOffice.

The title simply isn't there (neither field), despite being checked. The file starts with the author (and the odd character is only see when pulling into OpenOffice).

Is there any way to troubleshoot the catalog creation?

[koland]

BTW, I do have quite a few books, in case that makes a difference....

[kovidgoyal]

The odd character is the UTF-8 BOM. I dont use OpenOffice so I cannot tell you how to get it to recognize that.