Updated, but same behaviour. I uninstalled the older version before I installed this newer version 1.9.12cvs build date 2013-09-14 The file is as it looks in notepad (no tricks or anything hidden!)! (and with colons the same) date,value 2013:01,3.145 2013:02,6.290 I am in the UK if it is to do with my language settings. -----Original Message----- From: gretl-users-bounces(a)lists.wfu.edu [mailto:gretl-users-bounces@lists.wfu.edu] On Behalf Of Sven Schreiber Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 12:55 PM To: gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu Subject: Re: [Gretl-users] importing timeseries from csv into gretl Am 16.09.2013 13:25, schrieb Charles Vereker: Can you try a more recent build? (Windows snapshot / Linux cvs version) Looks strange indeed. Shall we take the three-liner above as the actual file for checking or is there something you're not telling ;-) As a workaround, replacing the dots in date with hyphens or something could help. cheers, sven _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users

File attached (it is (obviously when you look at it!) a small test file rather than a real dataset!!) I installed the cvs build on another machine (Windows 7) and had the same result. Charlie -----Original Message----- From: gretl-users-bounces(a)lists.wfu.edu [mailto:gretl-users-bounces@lists.wfu.edu] On Behalf Of Allin Cottrell Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 2:27 PM To: Gretl list Subject: Re: [Gretl-users] importing timeseries from csv into gretl On Mon, 16 Sep 2013, Charles Vereker wrote: It's unlikely to be anything to do with language settings. Could you post the data file as an attachment? (If it's big, please send it to me offlist.) You mentioned that gretl is saying first field: 'idate' line: idate,value when reading the first line of your file. I don't see how gretl could "imagine" an 'i' in front of the string "date"; certainly I've never seen anything like that happen. And if I copy the datafile lines out of your email and save that as somefile.csv, gretl reads the data as monthly OK. So I suspect there's something in the file that notepad is not showing. Though of course it could be some (very obscure!) gretl bug. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users

I see it! Thanks For anyone else who hits this the extra three characters did not show up in windows notepad or notepad++ . I used UltraEdit to see (and delete) them. And then everything works fine! -----Original Message----- From: gretl-users-bounces(a)lists.wfu.edu [mailto:gretl-users-bounces@lists.wfu.edu] On Behalf Of Allin Cottrell Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 3:24 PM To: Gretl list Subject: Re: [Gretl-users] importing timeseries from csv into gretl On Mon, 16 Sep 2013, Charles Vereker wrote: Thanks! There are indeed three unprintable (in ASCII) bytes before "date" in your file (0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf), the first of which is translating to 'i' in the gretl CSV reader (since in ISO 8859-1 the byte 0xef represents "i-dierisis"). You can see this if you open the file in a hex editor. Taken together these three bytes actually constitute the so-called byte order mark or BOM (permitted but not recommended in UTF-8 files by the Unicode standard, and apparently sprinkled around by Microsoft tools). It has no business at the start of a plain text file, but I guess we could teach gretl just to ignore it. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users

Sorry! I answer before my institutional server refresh and don't see Allin last message. ... And forgot to say that substitution with Notepad don't works (I try Wordpad).