Problems importing QIF files

[BenoitGrégoire]

On July 28, 2003 04:24 am, rneri at libero.it wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to describe a problem I've experienced with Gnucash.
>
> I've started Gnucash 1.8.4 for the first time, and chosen to import my .qif
> files, which I had previously exported from an old (5.0) Italian version of
> MS Money. At the end of the process I found out that Gnucash had loaded
> some of the files, and discarded the others.
>
> I've tried again loading them altogether, I've tried loading them one by
> one, I've even tried creating a CoA with exactly matching names before
> importing, none of these did any good.
>
> Eventually, I've looked into the .qif files and found out that the files
> that Gnucash refused to import had the type (in the first record !Type) in
> Italian. I've edited them, rerun the import process from the beginning, and
> this time everything has been loaded correctly.
>
> I would like to point out that in discarding the unknown file types Gnucash
> had been very very quiet, no warning or error messages whatsoever, which
> did not really help me find out what the problem was.
>
> Finally, I would like to ask a question: if I had my LANG variable set to
> it_IT, instead of C, would it have made any difference?

It wouldn't have made a difference.  For some dumb reason, someone at Intuit 
decided long ago that localizing the name of the QIF tags would be a good 
idea.  This means that there is one file format for every language and that 
all those variants aren't documented.  That's one of the many reason that the 
QIF file format is is broken.

The qif import code wasn't designesed to handle this problem.  It's currently 
being rewriten from scratch, but I don't know if there are plans to support 
multiple language.

-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/