Progress 4gl Creating a .xlsx file without excel - progress-4gl

Version: 10.2b
I want to create a .xlsx file with progress but the machine this will run on doesn't have excel.
Can someone point me in the right direction about how to do this.
Is there a library already written that can do something like this?
Thanks for any help!

The project was moved to the Free DocxFactory Project.
It was rewritten in C++ with Progress 4GL/ABL wrappers and tutorial.
It is 300x times faster, alot of new features were added including barcodes, paging features etc.
and it's completely free for private and commercial use without any time or feature limits.
HTH

You might find this to be useful: http://www.oehive.org/project/libooxml although it appears that there is nothing there right now. There might also be an older version of that code here: http://www.oehive.org/project/lib
Also -- in many cases the need to provide data to Excel can be satisfied with a Tab or Comma delimited file.
Another trick is to create an HTML table fragment. Excel imports those quite nicely.

A super simple example of how to export a semi-colon delimited file from a temp-table. In 90% of the cases this is enough Excel-support - at least it has been for me.
DEFINE STREAM strCsv.
DEFINE TEMP-TABLE ttExample NO-UNDO
FIELD col1 AS CHARACTER
FIELD col2 AS INTEGER.
CREATE ttExample.
ASSIGN ttExample.col1 = "ABC"
ttExample.col2 = 123.
CREATE ttExample.
ASSIGN ttExample.col1 = "DEF"
ttExample.col2 = 456.
OUTPUT STREAM strCsv TO VALUE("c:\test\test.csv").
FOR EACH ttExample NO-LOCK:
EXPORT DELIMITER ";" ttExample.
END.
OUTPUT STREAM strCsv CLOSE.

Related

Dataprep import dataset does not detect headers in first row automatically

I am importing a dataset from Google Cloud Storage (parameterized) into Dataprep. So far, this worked perfectly fine and one of the feature that I liked is that it auto detects that the first row in my (application/octet-stream) .csv file are my headers.
However, today I tried to import a new dataset and it did not detect the headers, but it auto assigned column1, column2...
What has changed and or why is this the case. I have checked the box auto-detect and use UTF-8:
While the auto-detect option is usually pretty good, there are times that it fails for numerous reasons. I've specifically noticed this when the field names contain certain characters (e.g. comma, invisible characters like zero-width-non-joiners, null bytes), or when multiple different styles of newline delimiters are used within the same file.
Another case I saw this is when there were more columns of data than there were headers.
As you already hit on, you can use the following snippet to do mostly the same thing:
rename type: header method: filter sanitize: true
. . . or make separate recipe steps to convert the first row to header and then bulk-rename to your own liking.
More often than not, however, I've found that when auto-detect fails on a previously working file, it tends to be a sign of some sort of issue with the source file. I would look for mismatched data, as well as misplaced commas within the output, as well as comparing the header and some data rows to the original source using a plaintext editor.
When all else fails, you can try a CSV validator . . . but in my experience they tend to be incredibly opinionated when it comes to the formatting options of the fileā€”so depending on the system generating the CSV, it could either miss any errors or give false-positives. I have had two experiences where auto-detect fails for no apparent reason on perfectly clean files, so it is possible that process was just skipped for some reason.
It should also be noted that if you have a structured file that was correctly detected but want to revert it, you can go to the dataset details, select the "..." (More) button, and choose "Remove structure..." (I'm hoping that one day they'll let you do the opposite when you want to add structure to a raw dataset or work around bugs like this!)
Best of luck!
Can be resolved as a transformation within a Flow:
rename type: header method: filter sanitize: true

Best way to get a database friendly list of Veteran Affairs Hospital

I sincerely apologize if this isn't the proper forum to discuss this, but I wasn't sure where to go or what would be the best option.
Basically, I'm trying to find a database friendly list of veteran affairs hospitals. The closest thing that I've been able to find is www.va.gov/ofcadmin/docs/CATB.pdf as it has all the information I'm looking for:
Region
Address
City in a separate column
Zip Code in a separate column
State
Facility # (also known as StationID)
VISN
Symbol
I've tried exporting that PDF out into CSV but it's a complete nightmare to get working. So, I was curious if anyone had any ideas or insights into how I could accomplish this task.
First, here's a CSV file containing the data found in CATB.pdf. The very first line contains the column headers, and the rest of the file contains the contents.
http://tmp.alexloney.com/CATB.csv
Now, for the more detailed explanation...I took the PDF you provided a link to, converted it to an HTML document using Adobe Acrobat, then I used a lot of Regular Expressions to parse the file and clean it up. Once the file was cleaned up enough, I was able to write a program to parse through the remainder of the file, grab the state and region, and spit it all out in a nicely formatted CSV.
Hope that helps you!
I believe that PDFILL has an option in it that will convert a PDF file to Excell. Once in Excell you should have no problem converting to a CSV file.

MATLAB: How to import multiple CSV files with mixed data types

I have just started learning MATLAB and have difficulties to import csv files to a 2-D array..
Here is a sample csv for my needs:(all the csv files are in the same format with fixed columns)
Date, Code, Number....
2012/1/1, 00020.x1, 10
2012/1/2, 00203.x1, 0300
...
As csvread() only works with integer numbers, should I import numeric data and text data separately or is there any quick way to import multiple csv files with mixed data types?
Thanks a lot!!
What you're looking for is maybe the function xlsread.
It opens any file recognized by Excel, and automatically separates text data from numerical data.
The problem is that the default delimiter for at least on my computer is ;, and not , (at least for my locale here in Brazil). So xlsread will try to separate the fields on the file with a ;, and not a comma as you'd like.
To change that you have to change your system locales to add the comma as the list separator. So if you feel like it, to do it in windows vista, click Start, Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Customize this format, and change the List Separator from ';' to ','. On other windows the process should be almost the same.
After doing that, typing:
[num, txt, all] = xlsread('your_file.csv');
will return something like:
num =
10
300
txt =
'01/01/2012' ' 00020.x1'
'02/01/2012' ' 00203.x1'
all =
'01/01/2012' ' 00020.x1' [ 10]
'02/01/2012' ' 00203.x1' [300]
Notice that if your locale has already the list separator set to ',', you won't have to change anything on your system to make that work.
If you don't want to change your system just to use the xlsread function, then you could use the textscan function described here: http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/textscan.html
The problem is that it is not as simple as calling it, as you will have to open the file, iterate on the lines, and tell matlab explicitly the format of your file.
Best regards
I recently wrote a function that solves exactly this problem. See delimread.
It's worth noting that xlsread on csv files only works in windows. On Linux or Mac, xlsread works in 'basic' mode which cannot read csv files. It might not be a great idea in the longrun to use xlsread in case you need to migrate across platforms or automate code runs on Linux servers.
xlsread is also much slower than other text parsing functions since it opens an Excel session to read the file.

Create Numbers file and open it with Numbers on iPad

I would like to do a task that is quite simple on other OS, but it is not so trivial on iOS. Namely, I want to create file and open it in Numbers.
I can preview the file with UIDocumentInteractionController and then offer it to user that he/she opens it.
THis seems to me quite a reasonable solution. However, I need to offer proper file format. I suppose CSV and XLS would be reasonable to implement and it would most probably work, but I would still like to do it in native Numbers format if possible. However, I can't find any info about this file format.
Basically, this task is about exporting data to another app and then working further with them.
I don't know of a library that can create native Numbers files. There are hoewever some libraries that allow creating XLS files. Since Numbers fully supports XLS, this is probably the way to go.
There is a comercial library available that might work on the iPhone (costs $200): http://www.libxl.com/
As for free XLS libraries, I only know xlwt, a Python module. You could set up a webservice that creates an XLS file for your app, using xlwt on the server side.
If you want to pass information to Numbers, you can probably also use CSV files. If you use CSV files, you must be aware of some things. There are two kinds of CSV files: the comma separated version (used in english speaking countries) and the semicolon separated (used in continental europe).
The comma separated CSV files look for example like this:
"ID","First Name","Last Name","Salary"
1,"John","Malkovich",3400.20
2,"Fred","Astaire",2000.60
The second kind of CSV files are semicolon separated and use a comma as decimal mark. They look like this:
"ID";"First Name";"Last Name";"Salary"
1;"John";"Malkovich";3400,20
2;"Fred";"Astaire";2000,60
On the Macintosh, Numbers expects a different format depending on the Region setting. If you have your Region set to the US, it will expect the first kind. If you choose Germany, it will expect the second kind.
I don't know what kind of files Numbers on the iPad expects.
Another alternative would be using copy and paste. Try to copy tab separated text into the clipboard.
I hope this may help you. I've contacted libxl team and they responded with the link to the demo version of their iPhone library: http://www.libxl.com/download/libxl-iphone.zip

Reading large csv files with strings containing commas as one field

I have a large .csv file (~26000 rows). I want to be able to read it into matlab. Another problem is that it contains a collection of strings delimited by commas in one of the fields.
I'm having trouble reading it. I tried stuff like tdfread, which won't work here. Any tricks with textscan i should be aware about?
Is there any other way?
I'm not sure what is generating your CSV file but that is your problem.
The point of a CSV file, is that the file itself designates separation of fields. If the text of the CSV contains commas, then nothing you can do will help you. How would ANY program know when the text in a single field contains commas, or when that comma is a field delimiter?
Proper CSV would have a text qualifier. Some generators/readers gives you the option to use one. The standard text qualifier is a " (quote). Its changeable, though, because your text may contain those, too.
Again, its all about generating proper CSV content.
There's a chance that xlsread won't give you the answer you expect -- do the strings always appear in the same columns, for example? I think (as everyone else seems to :-) that it would be more robust to just use
fid = fopen('yourfile.csv');
and then either textscan
t = textscan(fid, '%s', delimiter', sprintf('\n'));
t = t{1};
or just fgetl (the example in the help is perfect).
After that you can do some line-by-line processing -- using textscan again on the text content of each line, for example, is a nice, quick way to get a cell-array that will allow fast analysis of each line.
You have a problem because you're reading it in as a .csv, and you have commas within your data. You can get it in Excel and manipulate the date, possibly extract the unwanted commas with Excel formulas. I work with .csv files for DB imports quite a bit. I imagine matLab has similar rules, which is - no commas in your data.
Can you tell us more about your data? Are there commas throughout, our just one column? Maybe you can read it in as tab delimited?
Are you using a Unix system? The reason I am asking is that you could use a command-line function such as sed and regular expressions to clean those data files before you pass them into Matlab. Here is a link that explains how to do exactly what you are looking for.
Since, as others have observed, your file is CSV with commas inside what you think of as a single field, it's going to be hard to persuade Matlab that that really is only one field. I think your best strategy is going to be to read one line at a time, into a string acting as a buffer, and to translate it, field-by-field, into the variables or other data structures that you want. Since Matlab has in-built regular expression capabilities this shouldn't be too hard.
And, as others have already suggested, posting a sample of your data would help us to help you.
One easy solution is:
path='C:\folder1\folder2\';
data = 'data.csv';
data = dataset('xlsfile',sprintf('%s\%s', path,data));
Of course you could also do the following:
[data,path] = uigetfile('C:\folder1\folder2\*.csv');
data = dataset('xlsfile',sprintf('%s\%s', path,data));
now you will have loaded the data as dataset. An easy way to get a column 1 for example is
double(data(1))