[Koha-bugs] [Bug 11331] CSV export for viewlog.pl is missing newlines

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=11331

David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|Needs Signoff               |In Discussion
                 CC|                            |dcook at prosentient.com.au

--- Comment #3 from David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> ---
1) I agree that a newline should be added.

2) I'm not certain about using double quotes as a text qualifier. While this
will work for many of the logs, it won't work for any log that contains double
quotes within it (such as a cataloguing (biblio or item) modification,
authority modification, system preference modification).

I think most programs typically use single quotes, double quotes, or spaces as
text qualifiers, and all three of these won't work for us, since we have all
three of those within our text.

We also have commas in our text...and could possibly have tabs...so those two
delimiters aren't very useful either without using text qualifiers.

Of course, I don't see any easy solution to this problem. I think bibliographic
data is too difficult to express in a regular delimited text format, and we're
showing entire records in many of the logs. 

Perhaps we could clean problematic characters (tabs, commas, quotes, etc) from
the logs, but then we also compromise the integrity of those logs. 

Perhaps another idea would be to export using XML formats (ODS,XLSX) instead.
(We do this elsewhere in Koha.) Perhaps we should leave the simpler formats for
simpler data.

3) "Title" and "author" should be removed from the list. You could probably
safely do this without leaving the comment behind.

--

Anyway, those are my thoughts. 

Since this patch doesn't completely fix the log export, I'm tempted to mark it
as Failed QA.

However, while it isn't a perfect fix, it is better than what we're currently
doing, so maybe it's good enough for now. I'm marking it "In Discussion" to see
what others think.

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