[fpc-pascal] Spreadsheet library/unit?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Ralf A. Quint said:
> > > > Because the comma is a bad separator for countries where the comma is the
> > > > decimal separator, like most of mainland Europe.
> > >
> > > But CSV handles that fine!
> >
> >CSV is just that comma separated.
> >
> >Quoting is one common workaround. Another is to use a different separator.
> >And iirc Excel does that sometimes too. Maybe it is version dependant.
> 
> Sorry, but that is rather application depended. And there are a lot 
> that handle, both for writing and reading, "quoted" fields not 
> properly, though there is a relevant RFC about this in RFC4180 
> (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180)

Correct.
 
> >My favorite "csv" experience is to get csv's from the web opened in Excel,
> >for both Dutch as English locales. Really a sport :-)
> 
> I do this a lot, in and out of Excel and other application and Excel 
> in fact handles this better than anything else. If the CSV file has 
> been written properly to begin with...

It depends heavily on the mimetype also. Application/vnd.excel or so gave
the best results. But that is unstandarize OS specific, so it couldn't be
used on a "neutral" government site.

And the existance of characters that Excel (XP or 2003 it was I think) could
see as signal chars to switch charsets was also a problem.