I keep running into situations where gretl doesn't recognize the dates in my csv files. Now instead of asking for more heuristics and cleverness, I'm wondering whether it would be possible for the user to specify the format pattern at the time of opening/importing the file. E.g. let the user specify the string "yyyy~mm" to denote monthly data with strange separation characters (this is just an example, not my actual case). I don't know whether in the file-open dialogs there is actually a place to do that, though....

Am 29.06.2014 20:22, schrieb Allin Cottrell: > On Sat, 28 Jun 2014, Sven Schreiber wrote: > >> I keep running into situations where gretl doesn't recognize the dates >> in my csv files. Now instead of asking for more heuristics and >> cleverness, I'm wondering whether it would be possible for the user to >> specify the format pattern at the time of opening/importing the file. >> E.g. let the user specify the string "yyyy~mm" to denote monthly data >> with strange separation characters (this is just an example, not my >> actual case). >> >> I don't know whether in the file-open dialogs there is actually a place >> to do that, though.... > > For special cases one has the "join" command with its --tkey option. > I suppose --tkey could be added for plain "open", although as you > imply it wouldn't be trivial to find a suitable place for this in > the GUI. > > But could you tell us what sort of CSV dates are not being > recognized? Unless they're wildly idiosyncratic I think our > heuristics could probably be modified to handle them. > See attached. It's monthly data with date format "01/mm/yyyy", and I guess the redundant leading "01/" confuses gretl.