System Tools plan

A PSV (Pipe Separated Values) file will also be produced for those users who are unable to manipulate the XML file format. PSV is a file format where the data values are separated by the “pipe” character. The guidelines above will still apply as the PSV files will be created with a simple format conversion from the XML file.

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i2Paq wrote:

A PSV (Pipe Separated Values) file will also be produced for those users who are unable to manipulate the XML file format. PSV is a file format where the data values are separated by the “pipe” character. The guidelines above will still apply as the PSV files will be created with a simple format conversion from the XML file.

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ok still don't really see what brought up PSV files in the first place though. I would suggest sticking with CSV though as it opens nicely in excel. Yes you can open PSV files in excel, but it's a little work, and it's hard enough to get most customers to understand which option to choose when saving a CSV file let alone if they have to do non standard things to even open the file, thats one of the things that always drove me crazy about easy populate from oscommerce they used TSV and it always took forever to make customers understand how to use them if you could even get them through it at all.

The only quirk I'm dealing with now is although CSV files should be editable by excel in their default format and should not have any excel formatting.. Excel still stupidly formats the date.

The date coming from mysql is 2010-08-20
The data shown (and saved) when using excel to view the csv is 08-20-2010
So I'm working on the code to automatically convert it back when reimporting (stupid microsoft)

Qphoria wrote:"CSV" ... "comma" separated values

"PSV"... "pipe" separated values?

I think that in general, they are all referred to as CSV, or TXT files.

The benefit of pipe is that you don't get involved in problems with commas in the text, such as descriptions.

Commas, tabs and semicolons can all screw things up at times. And later versions of Excel will work and save as pipe delimited, I'm told.

I use CSVed, a free editor that will handle about any delimiter you want - http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html

In the end, all I'm saying is get something that can be used by the masses.

yes I use opencart and it handles pretty much any delimiter quite well as well, but most shop owners only know excel. Honestly I haven't used office much past 2k3 because I absolutely loath that stupid ribon.