From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-11-21T22:46:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing excel CVS data on a mac OSX to extract blocks of cells

On Nov 21, 2005, at 6:47 AM, anne001 wrote:

> Thank you so much for your help
> The data was collected by another lab. I don't know what they use. I
> saved their excel file data into a csv file. I don't know if there  
> is a
> way of telling excel to do a better job. I am on panther, with
> office 2004 for mac.

Excel might be legacy enough that it's still using \r as a return  
here, for the old Mac OS.  Try this:

ruby -p -i.bak -e 'sub("\r", "\n")' your_csv_file_here.csv

> require "csv"
> arr = CSV.read(File.expand_path("~/Desktop/FaceRetest.cvs"))
>
> I get an error:
> /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/csv.rb:607:in `get_row':
> CSV::IllegalFormatError (CSV::IllegalFormatError)
>
> Ara's formulation does the same thing.

I think this is a line ending issue.  The CSV format does not allow a  
naked \r outside of a quoted field.  Try my fix above and see if it  
gets you going, or you can switch the line ending for CSV's readlines():

require "csv"
arr = CSV.readlines(File.expand_path("~/Desktop/FaceRetest.cvs"), "\r")

If you're still having trouble and it's not a privacy concern, you  
are welcome to email me the CSV file off list, and I will try to  
figure out how to read it.

James Edward Gray II