Comment by OptionOfT
1 day ago
That's not an excel issue. That's a locale issue.
Due to (parts of?) the EU using then comma as the decimal separator, you have to use another symbol to separate your values.
1 day ago
That's not an excel issue. That's a locale issue.
Due to (parts of?) the EU using then comma as the decimal separator, you have to use another symbol to separate your values.
Comma for decimal separator, and point (or sometimes 'postraphy) for thousands separator if there is one, is very common. IIRC more European countries use that than don't, officially, and a bunch of countries outside Europe do too.
It wouldn't normally necessitate not using comma as the field separator in CSV files though, wrapping those values is quotes is how that would usually be handled in my experience.
Though many people end up switching to “our way”, despite their normal locale preferences, because of compatibility issues they encounter otherwise with US/UK software written naively.
Locales should have died long ago. You use plain data, stop parsing it depdending on wen your live. Plan9/9front uses where right long ago. Just use Unicode everywhere, use context-free units for money.
Locales are fine for display, but yes they should not affect what goes into files for transfer. There have always been appropriate control characters in the common character sets, in ASCII and most 8-bit codepages there are non-printing control characters that have suitable meanings to be used in place of commas and EOL so they could be used unescaped in data fields. Numbers could be plain, perhaps with the dot still as a standard decimal point or we could store non-integers as a pair of ints (value and scale), dates in an unambiguous format (something like one of the options from ISO8601), etc.
Unfortunately people like CSV to be at least part way human-readable, which means readable delimiters, end-or-record markers being EOLs that a text editor would understand, and the decimal/thousand/currency symbols & date formatting that they are used to.