[Gretl-devel] Re: delimiter for data files in text format
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 8:34 AM Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
<p002264(a)staff.univpm.it> wrote:
This has been dabeted several times, but IMO the issue still remains.
A colleague was trying to use gretl to import a dataset (with extension
.txt, but that doesn't really matter) whose first lines look like this:
"num"|"x"|"y"|"z"
"1"|0.273856207444503|-0.036672201779096|0.854726937504524
[ the "pipe" symbol '|' is being used as the field separator ]
it would have been nice to have an option to give the CSV importer the
delimiter character to split columns.
Allin, I think I remember you were against this feature for some reason,
but I can't recall what it was. Could you please remind me? Thanks!
Well, my reluctance was based on the supposition that in maybe 99+% of cases
libgretl would know what separator to use better than most users. I've now added
'|' as one of the options libgretl should consider, and in my testing
pipe-separated
fields work fine. I'm willing to reconsider, but I'd be surprised if
anyone can come
up with a real-world case where gretl (now) gets it wrong.
Allin