[R] RE:

Peter Dalgaard BSA p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk
Thu Dec 7 16:19:20 CET 2000


Alexandre Fayolle <Alexandre.Fayolle at logilab.fr> writes:

> On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Yves Gauvreau wrote:
> 
> > I would have tought that it was common knowledge that a file with a .csv
> > extention under windows, mean a file with comma separated values. Excel
> > knows how to handle many types of data files and a CSV file is just one of
> > these types.
> 
> Be careful to mind your internationalisation settings, though. On a french
> installation of windows, for example, the default decimal separator is the
> comma (','), and a csv file will use a semi-colon (';') as a separator
> (which can cause errors of read on a another machine with different
> parameters).

Danish settings will do that too as well as those of large parts of
continental Europe. Hence the existence of read.csv2() and in 1.2 also
read.delim2(). In fact some versions of Excel will write .csv in that
format and then try to use the comma as separator when reading the
file back in....

(And SAS uses '.' and ',' when im/exporting CSV irrespective of
locale, whereas SPSS uses ',' and ';' according to windows settings.
So over here they can't read eachothers CSV files without substantial
wand-waving. Sigh.)
-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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