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Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [Ethereal-users] RTP Stream Analysis in .csv

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 18:59:16 +0200
Lars Ruoff wrote:

Hello,

Yes, i understand the annoyance.
The problem is that we didn't hard-code the comma into the code, but the
comma sneeks in as the platform's decimal separator symbol via some locale
settings on your system (you wouldnt have that problem on an english
language environment, for example, where the decimal separator is '.').
I still don't know what system setting exactly is responsible.

@ethereal-dev:
There's another related problem, which i mentioned some time ago:
Float columns are not sorted properly, on systems with a comma as decimal
separator, as apparently atof() expects a comma, while g_snprintf generates
a dot.
Well, on my system that is! In fact this is kind of the opposite behaviour
of what Alois Hellmaier experiences, since i don't have the comma in the
output (although i have a French Windows XP install).
Alois, i think the float values in the column dialog box are comma-separated
on your system, right?
Does the sorting work for those columns?
Could you report us your Windows region/language settings, please?

Anyway, there seems to be a problem with localization issues between glib
and the c-stdlib, at least on Win32.
As i'm not at all familar with these locale/internationalization issues, i
would be glad if others could make comments on how to solve this problem.

Lars Ruoff


----- Original Message ----- From: "Heilmaier, Alois" <ahei@xxxxxx>
To: <ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 4:13 PM
Subject: [Ethereal-users] RTP Stream Analysis in .csv


Hello,

I do have ethereal version 0.10.5 on Windows 2000.
When I export the rtp-stream analysis in .csv format, the problem will be
the seperators.
E.g. jittervalue is 0,04 ms so in the value is a separator. One column has
value "0" the next column has value "04".
It would be better to use a semicolon as seperator, so my
spreadsheetprogram
(excell or openoffice) can list the correct values in a column.

Do others have the same problem, or any solution ?
Well, this is a problem of the csv format in general. If you save an excel sheet (using csv) containing "Hallo, goodbye!" in one field, and import it again, you have two fields.

I'm not sure, if there will be a solution at all (and we might not want to find a solution where none is :-(

csv is a *simple* format with known limitations.

It might *not* be a good idea to change the representation of data in some way, to circumvent this problem. As this will manipulate user data in a way none recoverable way.

Imagine you have a string from the packet data, and will replace all appearances of a comma by a dot. How do you recover the original text from that later?

These problems might not appear in the RTP stream export, but as other CSV exports might come along the way (several people asked me about exporting the packet list line in cvs), we should have a more general way to handle these problems.

Regards, ULFL