Re: bug#47885: [PATCH] org-table-import: Make it more smarter for interactive use

[Utkarsh Singh <utkarsh190601@gmail.com>]

Hi Maxim,

Sorry for the late reply!

On 2021-04-28, 23:38 +0700, Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 28/04/2021 15:37, Utkarsh Singh wrote:
>> +List of preferred separator (in order of preference):
>> +comma, TAB, semicolon, colon or SPACE.
> I will hardly be using this feature heavily, so I do not insist that
> the following must be taken into account. Just some considerations...
>
> There are locales where comma is used as decimal separator 23,5
> (e.g. ru_RU.UTF-8). Office software and applications oriented to
> office users often use semicolon as field separator. There are still
> may be plenty of numbers with fractional part, so with commas. Likely
> ";" should be tried at first for such locales.
>
> However the same user may have enough CSV files that are really "comma
> separated", e.g. results of numerical simulation where localization is
> intentionally ignored, data obtained from some equipment, etc.
>
> Some files (e.g. downloaded bank statements) may be in legacy 8-bit
> encoding instead of UTF-8.
>
> As a result, sometimes the only convenient way is to try various
> options with interactive preview.

What do we mean by interactive preview?  Does this mean that we should
present a user with a list of possible delimiters using minibuffer?

If you are suggesting this then rather trying 'various options' based on
locals you can use =org-table-import= function directly as it accepts
separator as it's argument.

For ex (please review my usage of alist):

#+begin_src elisp
(defvar my-separator-alist '(("comma" . ",")
			     ("tab" . "\t")
			     ("semicolon" . ";")
			     ("colon" . ":")
			     ("space" . " ")))

(defun my/table-import (file separator)
  (interactive (list (read-file-name "Import CSV file: " nil nil t)
		     (cdr (assoc (completing-read "Separator: " my-separator-alist)
				 my-separator-alist))))
  (org-table-import file separator))
#+end_src

-- 
Utkarsh Singh
http://utkarshsingh.xyz