FreeTDS Development Group

[Chris Sharman <chris.sharman AT ccagroup.co.uk>]

FreeTDS Development Group wrote:
> If you want to send a patch for csv we can incorporate in main distro.

Thanks - I've got some site & vms-specific mods, which I won't bother 
posting, but csv may be of more general interest, appended below. Hope 
that's ok - I don't have any standard difference-applying tools ...

static char separator[20] = "\t", *endsep = 0;
/* separator contains "\t", ",", "\",\"" or whatever, endsep contains 
"\"" or "'" if appropriate. */

In do_query():
case TDS_ROWFMT_RESULT:
        if ((!(opt_flags & OPT_NOHEADER)) && tds->res_info) {
                if (endsep && *endsep) fprintf(stdout, endsep);
                for (i = 0; i < tds->res_info->num_cols; i++) {
			fprintf(stdout, "%s%s", (i>0)?separator:"", 
tds->res_info->columns[i]->column_name);
                }
                if (endsep && *endsep) fprintf(stdout, endsep);
                fprintf(stdout, "\n");
        }


Similar changes go into TDS_ROW_RESULT

In main(), to allow commas (or whatever) and/or quoted values:

        char *sep;

        if ((0!=(sep=getenv("COLUMN-SEPARATOR"))) && *sep) {
            strcpy (separator, sep);
	    if (((*sep=='"') || (*sep=='\'')) && sep[1] && 
(*sep==sep[strlen(sep)-1])) endsep = separator+(strlen(sep)-1);
        };

All this enables output to be generated as tab-separated by default, or 
comma separated or whatever (via environment variable, or DCL logical), 
and optionally quoted. It could be done via a command line switch 
instead, I suppose, but VMS struggles with switch values, particularly 
when they contain special characters (like comma and quote).
I haven't done anything to check the output to ensure it's correct (no 
embedded separators and/or quotes), mainly because I don't know a 
universally acceptable way of escaping them if I find them. Universal 
for me means Excel + MS Navision dataports. This would be required to 
make it truly production quality.

Splitting the output csv's would be a nice feature, but I've done it in 
a fairly VMSish way (freopen), so you probably don't want that. In any 
case, it wouldn't be at all compatible with previous versions.

Thanks
Chris Sharman


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