Xavier Noria
5/2/2007 4:41:00 PM
On May 2, 2007, at 6:26 PM, Mike Steiner wrote:
> I'm writing a script to convert text into a csv file to import into
> MS Excel
> (under Windows), and Excel allows multiline text within a cell, but
> the
> newlines (\x0D\x0A) have to be replaced with only a \x0A for Excel
> to put
> everything into one cell.
>
> The problem is that in Ruby, if I do:
>
> newfield = field.gsub ( "\x0D" , "" )
>
> it doesn't do anything because Ruby treats \x0D\x0A as a unit.
Not really.
If there's a CRLF in the text file and you read it using text mode in
a CRLF platform, the CR is filtered out by the I/O layer. So a line-
oriented script only sees LFs in its strings, vaguely speaking.
Reciprocally, when you write to disk in text model in a CRLF platform
all LFs get a CR automatically prepended. That's transparent to the
programmer, in fact that's done by the very stdio in the C interpreter.
You probably need to work in binmode.
-- fxn