Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!psueea!!warren
From: warren@.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: "comma-delimited" format for data files
Message-ID: <2207@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jan 90 17:56:55 GMT
References: <3008@infmx.UUCP> <2926@optilink.UUCP>
Sender: news@psueea.UUCP
Reply-To: warren@eecs.UUCP (Warren Harrison)
Distribution: usa
Organization: /etc/organization
Lines: 21
Keywords: comma comma down doobie do down down, comma comma

In article <2926@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
>In article <3008@infmx.UUCP>, aland@infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes:
>> I have heard the above term thrown around but can't find any hard info
>> on it.  I gather that the protocol is that all fields are delimited by
>> commas and that all character fields are enclosed in (double) quotes.
>
>Character fields only need to be enclosed in double quotes if they
>contains commas themselves.

The most popular reason for using comma-delimited fields under MS-DOS is
for importing into Lotus or dBASE. I'm not sure with dBASE, but with Lotus,
things to be taken as labels (ie, non-numerics) must be enclosed in quotes
even if they don't contain commas or quotes themselves (at least my version
of Quattro will ignore thm if they're not quoted and I assume it acts like
Lotus in this respect).


==========================================================================
Warren Harrison                                          warren@cs.pdx.edu
Department of Computer Science                                503/725-3108
Portland State University