QIF spec ambiguity in example file

[David T.]

Daniel,

QIF was Quicken’s own data format that it used for its own purposes, and which others appropriated. Quicken abandoned QIF about a decade ago.

MIDI is an industry-agreed upon standard, with groups working on it.

As for the paucity of QIF files “in the wild”, I personally wouldn’t want MY financial transactions available on the web, and I suspectmost others don’t either.

As for what GnuCash understands, (referencing Biloti’s question), there is the QIF importer assistant, which I believe Geert worked on most recently. Section 3.3 of the Help manual discusses the QIF import process in GnuCash, and would be a good starting point. The code itself is supposed to be helpful as well, if you’re so inclined.

HTH,
David

On Apr 28, 2014, at 5:02 AM, Daniel White <twinbee42 at skytopia.com> wrote:

> Hi Biloti,
> 
> It was me who initially wrote the QIF post. Anyway, glad you
> sympathize with my problem. I've studied other specs such as
> MIDI, CSV, and vCard, and despite being more complicated (other than CSV,
> which is nevertheless (in practice) much more involved than one might expect!),
> they seem to at least be clearer on the basics.
> 
> People, whether accidentally or deliberately, for good or for bad, tend
> to extend, adjust, misuse, or even abuse the specification. It's hard enough
> to write an interpreter when the specification is perfectly concise, explicit
> and non-ambiguous due to people not following the spec. When the spec itself
> is unclear, then we have a potential catastrophe.
> 
> Anyway, what may help us to reverse engineer the format is to look for
> qif files out in the wild. They seem to be surprisingly few in number
> for such a popular format. Type this into Google: filetype:qif
> 
> Regards, Daniel
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:42:58 +0100, Ricardo Biloti <biloti at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Dear John
>> 
>> I totally agree with you. I am trying myself to write some scripts to
>> produce QIF file from my personal sources and I am struggling with lack of
>> precise information on QIF specification.
>> 
>> Personally, I would like to see the complete reference for the (subset) QIF
>> format that Gnucash understands, as well as a rich list of sample
>> transactions and their QIF translation.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Biloti
>> 
>> Em 27/04/2014 11:28, "John Ralls" <jralls at ceridwen.us> escreveu:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Apr 27, 2014, at 5:13 AM, twinbee42 at skytopia.com wrote:
>>> 
>>> > Hi John, I've just been looking over your article on the QIF
>>> specification and have been pondering an apparent ambiguity in the "Sample
>>> Files" example QIF file at the end. I was wondering if you'd be so kind to
>>> help clarify things.
>>> >
>>> > Here's the article:
>>> >
>>> >
>>> http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/trunk/src/import-export/qif-imp/file-format.txt
>>> >
>>> > After the "!Account" line, we have listed the control chars: N, T, D, Q,
>>> T, P, N, L, Y. However, the only control chars listed for the "Account
>>> Information Format" are: N, T, D, L, /, and $. So I'm guessing Q, P and Y
>>> must be referring to perhaps the control chars from the "Investment
>>> transaction format". However that doesn't seem to be made clear (as there's
>>> no caret symbol to say the "Account Information Format" section is over.
>>> >
>>> > A further piece of confusion arises since T is listed twice ("TInvst"
>>> and "T500"), and so T there means two different things. Also, D looks like
>>> a date ("D10/30/2006"). However D is also a control char for the "Account
>>> Information Format" which should mean "Description". When parsing this
>>> algorithmically, how can I tell which one it's supposed to be? A human can
>>> obviously tell it's a date, but I'm surprised, since specifications are
>>> usually much more rigid as there can be sometimes be numbers (or even a
>>> date) in a description if it's simply arbitrary text.
>>> >
>>> 
>>> As a general rule one shouldn't write developers directly. Most projects
>>> have mailing lists for handling user enquiries. Ours is
>>> gnucash-users at gnucash.org, and I've copied that list on this reply.
>>> Please subscribe to that list and direct any further correspondence there.
>>> 
>>> As it happens, I'n not the author of that file, just the last person to
>>> have touched it for a reason unrelated to its content. I don't know much
>>> about the QIF spec or the importer. Someone who does can answer your
>>> questions on the list.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> John Ralls
>>> 
>>> 
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