DOWNLOADS - Useless Formating

Yesterday when I downloaded the results of a screen or a ranking list it would download as an XLS file. Now when I do the same thing it downloads into a CSV file which when opened has all the applicable data, except it is all contained in one column with no spaces or commas separating it.

A simple ranking with “stock ranks only” looks like this:

Ticker# NA’sFinal Stmt100% Stock Rank

1ASX1N99.98
2MSN12Y99.96
3WTT11Y99.94
4BKCC1N99.92
5DRAD2N99.90

In it’s current form the downloads are unusable. Can you please undo whatever change was made so the the data can once again be downloaded in a usable format?

I posted the same thing too. The extension of the file should be TSV and not CSV or XLS. Just chage the file extension to TSV and instruct Excel to open TSV files.

Yes, we changed the file extension because the file is a tab deliminated text file and not actually an excel file - which would cause an annoying popup in later verions of excel. But not getting columns is far more annoying - we’ll change the file extension again later today.

thanks
ted

Please do the export as a tab-deliminated file.

I have found date formatting issues when opening the tab delimitated files under an xls extension that then required parsing and setting a bunch of dates.

So why is everything being changed. The previous interface and download function worked perfectly well. The current interface should be a beta version until all the problems are being sorted out. Please restore the old interface and functions.

Tab Separated Values have the “standard” extension TSV not CSV - that stands for Comma Separated Values. Please change it to TSV in P123 and not CSV to make applications that open this files to work correctly.

Thank you dmicsa - that was very helpful.

For charts, seems to work fine now. In .xls

Simulation downloads work fine for me.
Screen downloads have a date formatting issue when it mixes up month and date.
I would prefer all dates in all downloads to work as they do in the Simulation downloads.
Ideally, my preference is for the YYYY-MM-DD, ex 2015-03-31 format.

Shaun

the screen download dts will match sim format after market close tomorrow.

thanks
ted

It is changed back to XLS that is wrong but, after a warning Excel treats it as a TSV file by default. However LibreOffice still needs a lot of work to open it correct. If extension is changed to TSV it works correct.

I love standards. I hope P123 team too.

dmicsa

Popular consensus won over here - tsv is the correct format. It was changed to csv because more recent versions of excel associated csv files and were smart enough to use tabs instead of commas when it saw that the file was in fact tab delimited. However this is not the case with excel versions 2007 or earlier. We went back to xls because windows/office has no default file association with .tsv files and you would have to go digging around to find the excel executable to open open the tsv file (granted you only have to do this once).

In the future we’ll probably make the download link a button where you can choose xls, csv, or tsv formats (which would remove the libre office hassle). But for now we’ll stick with xls because it’s ‘easier’ not because it’s correct.

thanks for weighing in
ted

tedb, thank you for getting this done. When logged in one can now open P123 webpages and download to excel.

Unrelated to P123 but since we’re on the subject of appropriate file format for various kinds of delimited files, a space delimited file if I recall correctly should be easier to process when named with a .prn extension.