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BUG in Export Transactions to .CSV

Comments, critical feedback, praise, or suggestions for new features.

Postby dcayne » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:36 pm

When exporting transactions to a .CSV file (File > Export > Transactions > Generic...), FM fails to trap fields whose data contains a comma.

I believe it's part of the CSV standard that, when a field's data itself contains a comma, the field's data should be enclosed in double quotes when exported to the CSV file. Failure to do so makes the importing app incorrectly break that one field into many, adding extra fields for each comma it encounters—which is what happens now with FM's exported CSV files.

In my case, at least one of my brokers summarizes each trade in the MEMO field, and when the trade is for ≥1,000 shares includes the comma in the number. I'd also used commas in a few of my custom Category lables. When I export those transactions now, and then import them into Excel, they come in all messed up.

I've gone back and manually removed all the commas from my Category labels. And I'm now manually trying to find and edit out all the commas in my transaction MEMO fields (many, many dozens of them). But even so, next time I import a transaction for ≥1,000 shares, I'll have the same problem again.

Can you fix FM so it exports CSV files the way most other apps do, enclosing every field that contains a comma in double quotes?

BTW, I haven't tested exporting a report to CSV, to see if it behaves better.

Thanks,
—D.
dcayne
 
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Joined: Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:47 am

Postby Mark » Mon Jan 22, 2018 7:38 am

Hi dcayne,

The "generic" export is not necessarily only for CSV files. You control the format of the written file. If you have commas in a field, you can put double quotes around the field in the format string, and FM will write these double quotes to your exported file. For example:

MM/DD/YY,SYMB,TRAN,ANUM,BNUM,CNUM,"MEMO"

You could also put double quotes around all the fields, and not just the MEMO field. You could also make a tab delimited file, using something like:

MM/DD/YYTABSYMBTABTRANTABANUMTABBNUMTABCNUMTABMEMO
Thanks,
Mark
Fund Manager - Portfolio Management Software
Mark
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