From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Thomas von Dein <tom@vondein.org>
Subject: [feature-request] make org-quote-csv-field customizable
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 12:26:35 +0200
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To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org

Hello,

currently when exporting a table to CSV, fields are quoted automatically
if they contain a comma or a quote character. The regexp for this
determination is hard-coded in 'org-quote-csv-field.

This is good for most use cases. However, if you want to import such a
CSV with MS Excel then some unquoted fields will be automatically
converted by Excel into another format.

An example is a field containing 192.168.10.233. 'org-quote-csv-field
doesn't quote it, but Excel - for reasons I cannot fathom - considers
this a number (it doesn't do this when the last octet is below 233
though) and converts it to 19216810233 - which is wrong.

I wrote the following code to circumvent this Excel bug:

(defun tvd-org-quote-csv-field (s)
  "Quote every field and precede it with = to disable excel automatisms."
  (if (string-match "." s)
      (concat "=\"" (mapconcat 'identity
                               (split-string s "\"") "\"\"") "\"")
    s))

(defun table-to-excel ()
  "export current org table to CSV format suitable for MS Excel."
  (interactive)
  ;; quote everything, map temporarily 'org-quote-csv-field
  ;; to my version
  (cl-letf (((symbol-function 'org-quote-csv-field)
             #'tvd-org-quote-csv-field))
           (org-table-export "/tmp/ex.csv" "orgtbl-to-csv")))

To make this customizable, it would be good to have a variable which
contains the regex to determine what to quote. A parameter to
org-table-export would be an even better solution.


best regards, and thanks for this great module!
Tom