export to CSV

[tomekkaczanowski]

would be nice to have a "export to CSV" option for all kind of searches

sometimes it is important to take data and do some Excel magic with it

P.S. thank you for this already great plugin! :)

[mobz]

I have implemented partial support for this from the structuredQuery screen - at the moment it just prints the csv onto the page - can you have a look at this and check the format of the csv - I have not really used csv for many years (or with excel ) - eg line separator (using \r\n ), cell separator (using \t ) should I be quoting strings? - what do I do if there is data containing tabs or \r\n??- how should a csv handle sparse data? not sure the best format for some of this.

[tomekkaczanowski]

Hi, sorry for my late response!

I'm not an expert on CSV format myself, but I think you should simply use some CSV-parsing/writing library which will do the job for you. And IMHO, it does not really matter which "format" you use. I would be happy regardless of the format, if only I had data in CSV.

Cheers!

[mobz]

csv is a tricky format if you want excel compatibility. Different versions of excel handle utf-8 and characters like " and \t differently - and depending on whether you import the csv into an existing document or just open the file.

The format I've chosen works pretty well unless you have non-latin characters. As a work around - you can open the file in Google docs or Numbers then export as an excel file, then it works pretty well

[mobz]

Also note that you can download up to 25000 rows of data at once - the csv conversion is done in the browser, which pushes the browser pretty hard - don't try it in ie7.