Yup, with the USA-english version, if you just double-click to open one delimited by semicolons, it doesn't recognize the delimiters. For that matter, if you even open it from within excel, if it has the .csv ending, it still doesn't recognize them. Only by opening it from within excel with a different file ending, will you get the dialogue that lets you choose to treat a semicolon as a delimiter.
So guess your response makes more sense, that it *is* an artifact of international versions as the others suspected.
Hard to go wrong with tab-separated, though.
Sorry for the tangent into the oddities of MS-land, but was a mystery I wanted to see solved. Back to your regularly scheduled Stata discussions :)
________________________________
From: [email protected] on behalf of Ben Jann
Sent: Sat 12/16/2006 1:58 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: RE: Re: convert data to CSV
Hm, weird. Excel uses semicolons in CSV files on my system. In fact,
if I open (i.e. double click) a CSV file in which commas are used as
delimiting characters, Excel does not seem to recognize the commas as
delimiters. Maybe this is because I am from a German speaking part of
the world and Germans use the comma as the decimal marker.
Is it true that semicolon-delimited CSV files do not open nicely in
non-German Excel versions? Can someone check that? I am asking because
-esta- (a wrapper for -estout-) writes semicolon-delimited CSV and it
would be a pitty if this would only work in German Excel versions.
ben
On 12/16/06, Earnhart, Benjamin J <[email protected]> wrote:
> Per the Wikipedia entry, it seems like a reasonably well-specified
> format to me. I still prefer tab-delimited (what I call .tsv) since if I
> am in such a situation, I don't want to worry about commas or quotations
> within an entry, but done properly, .csv is just fine.
>
> Never did semi-colon delimited, except for a professor in computer
> science who wrote his own code and had his own conventions. And I go
> back and forth from Excel a lot. Sure, Excel will allow any delimiter
> you specify. But anything other than tabs and commas and you need to go
> out of your way to tell it what is the delimiter.
>
> So I dunno what Ben (the other Ben!) was referring to re: Excel
> expecting semicolons. Maybe parsing Excel XML? But if it's XML, then
> we're off in a world where anything can represent anything as long as
> it's properly specified, and that's far beyond humble .csv files.
>
> Ben Earnhart
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alan
> Neustadtl
> Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 8:37 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: st: RE: Re: convert data to CSV
>
> The wikipedia entry on this topic is informative
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values). Apparently
> there is no one agreed upon formal specification.
>
> Best,
> Alan
>
>
> On 12/16/06, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> > In this part of Europe, namely Britain, comma-separated means
> > what it says. I haven't tested for change of behaviour on
> > the other side of La Manche.
> >
> > Nick
> > [email protected]
> >
> > Kit Baum
> >
> > > Well, Microsoft Office Help for "CSV file" says that data items are
> > > separated by commas, so I don't know why Excel would expect that
> > > (unless a default preference has been altered). Perhaps European
> > > versions of MS Office behave differently because the comma is
> > > used as
> > > a digits separator. But RAY is on the same side of the pond as I am.
> >
> > > On Dec 16, 2006, at 2:33 AM, Ben wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > What Ray probably means is that Excel expects semicolons as
> > > delimiters
> > > > in a CSV file.
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