Why does exporting the BOM as CSV use semi-colons instead of commas?

On 15/05/14 23:46, RoboticsGuy wrote:

Unless I'm missing something, it appears cadsoft doesn't understand that

CSV stands for "comma-separated values." When I export the BOM choosing

the output format as CSV, Eagle outputs a file that uses semi-colons as

field separators instead of commas. What the heck?!

This is normal and correct. The CSV format is actually "character

separated" where the character can be one of a number of common

punctuation symbols. In many European locales, for example, the comma

character is used as the decimal point, so it couldn't possibly be a

field separator. Thus semicolon is the commonly used separator. A lot of

software will do this depending on your OS locale settings.

 

The problem is that I need to be able to open the BOM in Excel.

That's not a problem

Currently this means after exporting the BOM, I have to open it in a

text editor and use search & replace to change all of the semi-colons to

commas.

No, it doesn't. Excel is quite capable of opening a semicolon-separated

file, provided you employ the necessary runes. Not being a regular Excel

user I can't remember the details (and in any case Microsoft insist on

changing those sort of things with every version). I know how to do it

in OpenOffice, which basically just offers the dialog box every time -

you untick "comma" and tick "semicolon" instead.

Am 16.05.2014 00:46, schrieb RoboticsGuy:

Unless I'm missing something, it appears cadsoft doesn't understand that

CSV stands for "comma-separated values." When I export the BOM choosing

the output format as CSV, Eagle outputs a file that uses semi-colons as

field separators instead of commas. What the heck?!

 

The problem is that I need to be able to open the BOM in Excel.

Currently this means after exporting the BOM, I have to open it in a

text editor and use search & replace to change all of the semi-colons to

commas.

 

Am I missing something?

 

--

Hello

if you open the Bom.ulp in a texteditor, you find in the line 45

char   Separator = ';'; // 2012-12-04

so you can chose your own character.

May be '\t' as Tab or ',' as your favorite.

HTH

Werner

Thanks, I'll give that a try!

Also, just for the record, it is not easy to import a semi-colon delimited file into Excel (at least not the North America version). If you Google it, you'll find lots of people asking how to do it and the answers are never simple (almost all that I read involved opening the file in a text editor and adding something like delimiter=; to the top).

"Hello

if you open the Bom.ulp in a texteditor, you find in the line 45

char   Separator = ';'; // 2012-12-04

so you can chose your own character.

May be '\t' as Tab or ',' as your favorite.

HTH

Werner"

You, sir, saved my life and I love you for it

Just a note to autodesk - google sheets has the same import problem as excel.   i've been manually creating the BOM for the generated csv and text file for years.     the mod to the bom.ulp shown above is great, thanks!

I don't know if I did the mod correctly on the BOM.ulp as the import was still quite broken.  Playing around in the latest (Sep 2018) excel, there is a box that says "tell me what you want to do"  and I put import text/csv and it and some weird magic happened, a new dialog popped up that looked good on columns! I then hit load and the import looked good!