[GNC] Bugzilla account request

[Tom Teixeira]

https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=799774 has some more 
information. I have a patch attached to that bug report.

On 6/11/26 6:27 AM, David H wrote:
> David,
>
> I think this posting has an example of Tom's issue ? 
> https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2026-June/120813.html
>
> Cheers David H.
>
>
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 at 18:14, David Cousens <davidcousens49 at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>     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
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