Importing CSV file issues : two files with the same code not working the same

GanttProject Desktop Support
#1

I messed around with the import from csv file and faced some particular situation : I’ve got two csv file with the exact same content, one is able to be imported in ganttproject but not the other one

Not Working.csv (162 Bytes) Working.csv (165 Bytes)

I did all the tricks(export from ganttproject, check the csv data structure, bla bla bla) I just wanted to lean the csv file as much as possible until I faced this issue. Any clues ?

PS : The column names are in french since this is the version installed on my PC ; those are the stock column names in the csv file when I export from ganttproject. I don’t know if the import module is language sensitive.

Thank you

#2

As you can see, “Working.csv” is three bytes longer than “Not Working.csv”. That’s because “Working.csv” is proper UTF-8 while “Not Working.csv” is not (it is Latin-1 encoding aka ISO 8859-1). The difference is in é letter in the column names which takes two bytes in UTF-8 and 1 byte in Latin-1.

GanttProject expects that column names in CSV match those in the UI (and it makes import language sensitive) and column names in GanttProject UI are encoded in UTF-8. So, it finds no match for Date de début,Numéro hiérarchique columns. Date de début is naturally required for successful import.

#3

Thanks for the feedback, it makes sense.

You see, I think that this might explains why so many people are reporting issues with CSV import on this forum. The working csv file was exported directly from ganttproject and the “not working” one was generated from Excel and then modified to fit the ganttproject standard.

It seems that it is impossible to control the output format when exporting a csv file from excel, which can cause issues at the import.

Question : I would like to try exactly the same test but using .txt file import. But, since it is not possible to export a .txt file from ganttproject, I do not know what is the required formating for the file. This info is also nowhere to be found on the forum. Is it possible to provide me with this info ?

Thanks again,

#4

And this is not the only problem with CSV produced by Excel. We’ll have native Excel import in GanttProject 3.0 which hopefully will solve these issues.

TXT is just a plain list of task names, one task per line.

#5

Good shit, you guys are the best.

Anyway, this issue is now closed