README comment on use with Microsoft Excel #60
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| ###Usage with Microsoft Excel | ||
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| Another comman usage scenario for CSV data is when you want to import tabular data that was exported from Microsoft Excel. If you are on a Mac, you may well be exporting the data from Microsoft Excel 2011 for Mac, which lets you choose the export file format from the File / Save As option. However, if you have any extended characters then "Comma Separated Values" or even "Windows Comma Separated" can be a hazardous choice, because neither will use a unicode-aware text encoding. You're safest choice is to save as a "UTF-16 Unicode Text", which is in fact a tab-separated values file, with escaped quotation marks, and certain fields surrounded in double quotes. With `CHCSVParser`, you can read such a file into an array of arrays as follows: |
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This is a short addition to the README which shows how to use CHCSVParser to read data exported from Microsoft Excel, with correct handling of text encoding issues.
I think this is worth mentioning since it's a common use case, and the obvious thing to do (use Excel's Save As ".csv") produces subtle problems with text encodings.