Importing bank statements in CSV format

[Geert Janssens]

On zondag 7 mei 2017 16:11:44 CEST David Carlson wrote:
> When a csv file is opened by a spreadsheet application, the transactions
> appear in a nice table format which makes it almost trivial to use a mouse
> to cut and paste either wanted information or unwanted information.  Then
> save to the same CSV format instead of the spreadsheet format.  If that is
> not helpful for your case...
> 
> I may be wrong about this as I am just now learning how it works in GnuCash
> release 2.6.15...
> I think that the CSV importer that is available in most of the versions of
> GnuCash except the next one which will be much easier to use and has not
> been officially released yet allow you to select which lines to import
> while you are defining the format of the data file and assigning the
> columns to GnuCash columns.  Then, when you get to the last stage where you
> can edit the account assignments, you can also choose not to import each
> transaction similarly to how it is done in with the OFX import.  Or you can
> choose to assign unwanted transactions to a special account to be deleted
> later.
> 
> David C

I'm having some trouble reading the part where you talk about the current 
importer and the new one in one single sentence. While the flow in the new 
importer will be an improvement over the current one (at least I would hope 
so), both have essentially the same options to skip lines. I'll mention them 
here:
1. There are fields you can enter the number of lines to skip at the beginning 
or end of file.
2. There's a check box that allows you to skip all even lines. This assumes 
your csv file consists of interleaved lines with data and non-data (info) in a 
regular pattern.
3. There's an option that will allow you to skip lines with parsing errors. If 
your info lines consistently have bogus data in for example the date field, 
this could be used as a crude filter technique.
4. On the last page you can untick the "A" (which stands for "Add") field for 
each line you don't want to import.

Other than that there will be situations where some preprocessing of the csv 
file will  be needed before an import can be done. CSV is a very generic file 
format so it's very difficult to cope with all possible variations.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Geert