[LRUG] Reading Outlook Contacts

[Alan Buxton]

Looks like a bit of a bugger's muddle. There's CSV and there's CSV, apparently.

Outlook 2010, Windows 7 has the following export options:
* Comma separated values (DOS) <= this one is the default but uses a pretty basic character set that will ruin your £, € and é characters
* Comma separated values (Windows) <= at least it will represent accurately all your characters
* Access
* Excel (unfortunately in 97-2003 format)
* Outlook data file (pst)
* Tab separated values (DOS)
* Tab separated values (Windows).

And when exporting a comma-separated or tab-separated file there is no attempt to force a certain suffix on the file so just because your file ends in .csv doesn't give you 100% confidence as to the delimiter or to the character set being used.

You may well find it more straightforward exporting to an Excel file and importing from that.

a


-----Original Message-----
From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Stewart
Sent: 06 February 2013 12:27
To: London Ruby Ruby Users Group
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Reading Outlook Contacts


On 6 Feb 2013, at 13:16, Andrew Premdas wrote:
> Have you looked at fastercsv (https://rubygems.org/gems/fastercsv)

Thanks, though I need to know the column separator and the file encoding – not how to read CSV generally.

For example one random source I found said the Outlook's CSV files were comma separated and ASCII-8BIT; another said they were tab separated and UTF-16LE.

Cheers,
Andy
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