33 posts tagged “csv”
2009
No PDFs! The Sunlight Foundation point out that PDFs are a terrible way of implementing “more transparent government” due to their general lack of structure. At the Guardian (and I’m sure at other newspapers) we waste an absurd amount of time manually extracting data from PDF files and turning it in to something more useful. Even CSV is significantly more useful for many types of information.
2008
UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.
2007
Guide to the Dabble DB Plugin API (via) This is really nice—Dabble POSTs your plugin script a bunch of CSV values, your script returns CSV for the derived fields. Doesn’t seem to state which flavour of CSV though.