CSV attachment is full of quotation marks?

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

The following CSV template produces column headers and field data with quotes around them. This is particularly problematic because one column/field contains commas, and the contents get spread across multiple “cells” in the CSV. What am I doing wrong? Thanks!

“Learner I-CAR IDs”,”Course Title”, “Start Date”,”Completion Date”,”Grade (All Pass?)”
<<Start:orderby(Select(schedule[event id], and(date([start])>=now()-31,right([event type],3,)=” GA”,[all pass]=”Yes”)), [start])>>
“<<[attendee names]>>”,”<<[event type]>>”,”<<[start]>>”,”<<[end]>>”,”<<[All Pass]>>”
<<End>>
2

I don’t understand your concern. Your template has quotes, so your output will have quotes.

For reference: Comma-separated values - Wikipedia

3

I’m thinking it has to do with the format of the quotes (“ ”) instead of standard quotes (")

Standard CSV parsers only recognize ASCII double quotes (", ASCII 34) as delimiter boundaries for fields that contain commas. Could you try changing it to standard quotes?

4

The documentation from Appsheet shows all fields having quotes around them as being a requirement for the template. I’ll give it a shot without them, but since one of my fields contains commas, I imagine I’ll have to use a different delimiter… semicolon?

5

Let me give this a look-see… It appears the latest version of Notepad, which I’ve often used to edit plain text files, now behaves more like Wordpad. I’m turning off “formatting”, which seems to allow a “plain” ASCII double-quote… I’ll see if that fixes it.

6

Quotes are a good idea, and required at times, as you suggested.

I’m still not sure what the problem is, if it’s not what @Jose_Arteaga mentioned.

7

The quotes being left/right facing rather than “plain” ASCII quotes were indeed the problem/solution. Notepad not being the “plain” text editor it used to be caught me off guard. I turned off “formatting” in Notepad and it solved the problem. Thanks!