CSV Export for Reports

Joshua Sled jsled@asynchronous.org
Tue, 6 Feb 2001 00:50:06 -0800


On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 08:49:50AM -0600, Bill Gribble wrote:

| There is no support for this kind of export ATM.  I don't think it
| would be really hard to code up, once it was clear what should go in
| the output... but that's pretty tricky.  Reports contain any kind of
| HTML, including text, tables, images, live Guppi graphs, even certain
| kinds of Gnucash windows.  It's not like a report is just a table that
| you can convert to CSV.
| 
| Do you have any thoughts on how report writers might include
| information about what could be exported and how?

I did this for a work project by inserting a layer between data generation
[which just generates a list] and formatting [which generates Perl-'format'
text, CSV and HTML reports].  The table headers for the HTML and CSV tables
could be defined in the same array... unfortunately, the text/perl-formatted
reports had to be defined seperately.

The images and live Guppi graphs present a bigger challenge; but presumably
the reason to export to CSV is to import to Gnumeric/Excel, and do some
user-controllable graphing...  perhaps some information loss is exported
data is acceptable.

In any case, it shouldn't be too hard [either] to go the other route and
convert an HTML table to CSV... especially if it's well-formed [X]HTML.

...jsled