[GNC] Bugzilla account request

[David Cousens]

Tom,

I've just had a quick look at the code for parsing the csv input in
GnuCash. It uses the C++ boost library tokenizer method  to break up an
input CSV line into the fields. The boost tokenizer  apparently doesn't
handle backslashes or double quotes well so GnuCash does a bit of
preprocessing on the line before passing it to the boost tokenizer.
That preprocessing for backslashes consists of if a single backslash
occurs in the input line it makes it a double backslash by inserting
another backslash following it unless the following character is
already a backslash as the standard C++ string processing used in
boost's tokenizer requires backslashes to be escaped to be interpreted
as a backslash within the token. 

I'm currently locked out of bugzilla with I think an expired password
as its been a few years since I accessed it so I can't access any bug
reports there until I am granted access again. If you can send me an
example of a BoA line which is causing the problem Imay be able to work
out what the problem is.



On Mon, 2026-06-08 at 09:31 -0400, Tom Teixeira wrote:
> 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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-- 
David Cousens