Re: [Gretl-users] 'store' issues
Allin Cottrell schrieb:
On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>
> * store saves data in ~, even though ~/gretl is activated in prefs
The notion is that "store" is an "expert" command: the filename used
is
exactly what you type on the command line, so if it's not an absolute
path it goes into the present working directory. This should be
documented, no doubt.
Which (environment?) variable determines that directory then? Or related
to that: How can I find out in a script where the user directory (which
is set in gretl's preferences) is to use that value?
> * with data from example file data2-3.gdt (annual), store saves dates
> as literally "'1995" (including the double quotes); reopening works
> fine, but why all these quotes, including the single quote?
This may be redundant with annual data, but as I recall it's an attempt
to avoid breakage when saving, e.g., quarterly or monthly data for use
in a spreadsheet. Excel will do weird and wonderful things with, say,
"1975:01", unless a single quote is prepended to indicate that it's a
literal string.
Well gretl isn't entirely consistent here; consider what a 'store
test.csv LRM --csv' gives me for the quarterly Danish example data:
obs,LRM
"1974Q1",11.63255023
"1974Q2",11.60415248
"1974Q3",11.58152067
"1974Q4",11.60184741
"1975Q1",11.58630490
<etc.>
I have two problems with that:
1) Ok, "1974Q1" is a string and thus comes with quotes. But so are
"obs"
and "LRM", yet they don't have quotes around them.
2) For annual data you get "'1960" as a spreadsheet workaround, but for
quarterly you don't get the single quote. Actually, although I
understand your Excel argument for stuff with a ":" in it, I don't
understand why that would be relevant for simple year integers in annual
data.
All this makes parsing gretl's csv files error-prone IMHO. I propose to
do one of the following two things: Either enclose _all_ strings in
double quotes, and have the enclosed-but-leading single quote for all
date values; (X)OR remove _all_ quotes, and change the separator ':' to
'M', 'W', 'D' according to the data frequency, in analogy to the
'Q' for
quarterly data. What do you think?
> * gui importing from csv seems to presuppose .csv extension, must use
> ascii import for csv files with different extension -- is that necessary?
No, probably not.
Then I would suggest to mimic the behavior of ASCII import, or possibly
merge them anyway, just like in the 'open' command.
> * 'open' seems to rely on heuristics only; why no possibility to
> specify e.g. --csv as in store?
Because, generally speaking, gretl is smarter than most users when it
comes to figuring out the format of imported data! ;-) But seriously,
what useful information could you give gretl by saying "--csv"? Gretl
will have to check the format of the data anyway.
Ok, I take your point, until gretl screws up, then I will come back to
you ;-)
thanks,
sven