[GNC] character encoding and CSV standards

[Patrick James]

There is no ""official" definition of CSV format." Unless, of course, by official in quotes you do mean not necessarily official.

With CSV two individual parties can agree on a standard, be it RFC4180 or some other format. If the data is just being handed to you from someone who is not willing to agree to your specific needs, then you must process the data as provided, which generally means pre-process before import.

Also based on your bug report, my guess is this is more about interpreting character encoding, specifically the \" combination, rather than the parsing of the CSV fields.

> On 06/06/2026 6:29 PM PDT Tom Teixeira <tjteixeira at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>  
> Look at RFC 4180 which is the "official" definition of CSV format. Bank 
> of America is producing CSV files that are consistent with the RFC, and 
> can also be read directly by Microsoft Excel. Apple's Numbers, 
> LibreOffice and Google Sheets all handle this CSV file without problems, 
> so I believe it is a Gnucash bug, not a Bank of America bug.
> 
> On 6/6/26 7:44 PM, David Cousens wrote:
> > BoA problem not GnuCash problem.
> >
> > On Sat, 2026-06-06 at 09:56 -0400, Tom Teixeira wrote:
> >> I would like a bugzilla account. I have encountered a bug with CSV
> >> files
> >> from Bank of America sometimes having embedded backslashes that do
> >> not
> >> import properly. I work around the problem by editing the CSV file
> >> before importing, but did investigate and found RFC 4180 does not
> >> allow
> >> use of backslash as a quote character. I want to submit a formal bug
> >> and
> >> may be able to construct a patch to fix the bug.
> >>
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