From: Gene Tani <gene.tani@...>
Date: 2005-11-21T22:52:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing excel CVS data on a mac OSX to extract blocks of cells


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.
>
> 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 there is a way to replace special characters in emacs but  what
> I tried so far does not work.
>
> I thought I could use readlines and a puts and then copy the ruby
> output, which would not longer have the ^M, but somehow, ruby gets
> mixed up, and suddenly stop parsing the lines, so I can't relie on ruby
> readline either. It sounds like I need to figure out how to format the
> input file better. And then I will be able to use your suggestions.
>
> thank you

There's a few ways to handle converting newlines between O/S:

- require 'ptools'; File#nl_convert here:
http://ruby-miscutils.sourceforge.net/ptools.html

- specify $/ input record separator and $\ output separators for
IO#gets, readline, each_line etc.

- Komodo has a Code / Clean Line Endings which will convert to the O/S
format you're
running it on

but there's no automatic conversion like python
open("filename.ext","U"), I think