CSV import trouble (numbers & locale)

users
#1

Hello.

I'm producing a CSV for a customer of mine, which will import it with LibreOffice 6.2 on a Mac.

If LibreOffice locale (from Options menu item) is set to English, everything is fine; if it's set to Italian there are problems with numbers:
_ 123.45 gets correctly read as 123,45 (we use comma for decimals in Italian);
_ 123.456 is read as 123456, when it should be 123,456.

So my customer has to switch global locale, import the file and switch back (not sure if she also needs to restart LO).

What puzzles me is that she's also asked the locale in the import dialog, but what she chooses here doesn't seem to matter.

Is this a bug or am I overlooking something?

  bye & Thanks
  av.

#2

IMHO the issue could be related to the cell format, either to the number
of decimals or to the thousands separator. In any case, the cell format
can be tweaked.

#3

Thanks for your answer.
However I'm not sure what you mean here:

_ tweaking on the CSV side? Sure I can, but I'd rather not: the file has other uses, besides being importe in LibreOffice; also it's already correct (for some definition of correct, i.e. English locale);

_ tweaking during import? I don't see any option to choose decimal separator; only locale setting, which, as I said, does not work.

_ settings decimal separator globally? This is not what my customer wants: she wants to work with Italian locale, but be able to import this single file with dot as decimal separator; the option seems to be there, just not working.

_ Something else? What?

What I'm trying to understand is whether the fact that setting locale in the import dialog has no effect is a bug (which I should report) or if I'm just trying something that will never work conveniently and I'll need to think about a different workflow.

  bye & Thanks
  av.

#4

Howdy,

Well, I'm using LibreOffice 6.2.3 (with Ubuntu) and have created a csv file
with two data rows
12.12
12.123

Then set my global locale to Italian(Italy) and try to open the csv file.
(which is using a tab to separate values btw)
If in the dialog box I change the defaulted Italian(Italy) locale to
English(USA) everything works as expected, with the data in the now
Italian(Italy) local file:
12,12
12,123

If I do not set the locale in the import dialog to a locale which used the
'.' for decimal it does not work properly.

But if doing it in that order does is not working on the MAC then I would
say yes you should open an issue in the bug tracker.

Best wishes,

drew

#5

After opening a CSV file, The 'column type' can be set (see atached picture.)

The data in the columns (12.12 and 12.123) is imported using the decimal separator of the language of you locale, in my case 'Dutch' (=decimal ",")

test.csv

#6

I'm writing just to report the status, after some test:

_ on a Mac with 6.2.0 I had no problem;
_ on another Mac with 6.2.1 I had the problem I described;
_ after upgading the latter to 6.2.3, everything is working fine.

  bye & Thanks
  av.