[GNC] Bugzilla account request

[Tom Teixeira]

If you do a web search for csv files and backslash, you will see that 
this has been a contentious issue for many software products, with many 
telling their users that they _have_ to preprocess the input if they 
want backslash to appear in any location in a data field. Others -- like 
Microsoft Excel -- never give special treatment to backslash and have no 
option to do so.

A solution I would be happy with is something that disabled special 
handling for backslash. I don't know whether being able to choose a 
different escape character. A quick google search says "For more 
specific configurations, tools like the Python CSV module allow you to 
manually define any character as the quotechar or escapechar depending 
on your data needs." The boost library that Gnucash uses does allow 
specifying zero or more characters to treat as escape characters.

On 6/8/26 6:59 AM, Fred Bone wrote:
> On 08 June 2026 at 6:32, Tom Teixeira said:
>
>> And I repeat that the file produced by BoA is read as is by Microsoft
>> Excel and LibreOffice and many other popular spreadsheet programs, without
>> preprocessing.
> The question is, read how?
>
> When I save the 3 sample lines verbatim into a file with filetype ".csv",
> and open it in LibreOffice, the result is that the backslashes are read
> verbatim. So it is NOT treating them as escape characters.
>
> An old copy of Lotus 1-2-3 does the same.
>
> Google Sheets does the same if I "upload" the same file.
>
> I don't have "many other popular spreadsheet programs" to test with.
>
> Gnucash appears to treat backslashes unconditionally as escape
> characters, which it seems to me is the source of the problem. On the
> other hand, reportedly other data sources do use backslashes as escapes
> (which is presumably why Gnucash so treats them).
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