[Rd] RODBC bug or doc error in sqlFetch on xls files (PR#7354)

[M. Edward Borasky]

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 10:23, gunter.berton at gene.com wrote:
> R 2.0.0 patched under win2000. MS Office Excel 2003. ODBC Drivers? 
> 
> This may not come as a surprise -- sqlFetch() (and perhaps other ?) appear
> not to handle table/worksheet names with spaces in them in Excel tables. I
> was not able to find documentation that specifically mentioned this,
> although the Help pages vaguely hinted that there might be difficulty with
> Excel's "peculiar handling" of table names. Anyway, here is a sequence of
> actions that illustrate the issue.

IIRC the SQL Language standard specifically requires table and database names to 

a. start with a letter, 
b. contain nothing except letters and digits and the "underscore", and
c. be at most 31 characters long.

In other words, Excel is doing something that many other tools don't
support.

(and don't get me started on case (in)sensitivity.)