innovation initiative

I have to get some real work done, that i can post about, cause this is starting to feel like i’m a broken record player just, cause all i’ve posted about lately is parseCSV{}… lol

Obviously having major hard drive problems haven’t helped

Anyway, i spent the most part of today updating parseCSV{}, finishing an automatic delimiter character detection, cause the original project i created it for, requires such a function. The reason being so users don’t really have to know what a delimiter character is, or which one the file their attempting to upload uses. Eitherway, its a very handy function, and hardly slows down the script at all.

The original reason i started working on it cause i realized some versions of MS Excel for Windows uses ; instead of , as a delimiter no matter which CSV option you choose. And the script was being used to upload that from Excel, which caused issues, so to simplify matters, some type of auto-detection was required…

The auto() function works by simply analyzing a specific number of rows (15 by default) from the beginning of the csv file/data, and eliminating characters that simply can’t be the delimiter cause it doesn’t exist on every row, or the the number of times a character appears in a row isn’t the same on all rows. Rarely will any other character than the actual delimiter get past this stage of elimination, but if more then one character does, the script goes on to further analyze details to choose which character is the most likely to be the delimiter.