Surround non-numeric tsv fields with quotes

[rcurrie]

Excel will convert text that appears to be a date unless you surround it with quotes leading to all sorts of shenanigan:

http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7

By default surround all non-numeric fields (in particular gene names) in tsv files that are downloaded (expression levels tables, gene sets...). Ideally also provide a way to not surround them but this should be harder to get to (default checkbox that's on that says 'Format for Excel')

[rbaertsch]

Be careful, I worry that ALL fields are non-numeric. How do we currently represent nulls in numeric fields? Are they strings?

On Aug 26, 2016, at 8:21 AM, Rob Currie [email protected] wrote:

Excel will convert text that appears to be a date unless you surround it with quotes leading to all sorts of shenanigan:

http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7
By default surround all non-numeric fields (in particular gene names) in tsv files that are downloaded (expression levels tables, gene sets...). Ideally also provide a way to not surround them but this should be harder to get to (default checkbox that's on that says 'Format for Excel')

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[rcurrie]

Maybe we just focus on the primary culprits - the gene columns names. If there is anything numeric in a column we leave the entire column as is without quotes.

On Aug 28, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Robert Baertsch [email protected] wrote:

Be careful, I worry that ALL fields are non-numeric. How do we currently represent nulls in numeric fields? Are they strings?

On Aug 26, 2016, at 8:21 AM, Rob Currie [email protected] wrote:

Excel will convert text that appears to be a date unless you surround it with quotes leading to all sorts of shenanigan:

http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7
By default surround all non-numeric fields (in particular gene names) in tsv files that are downloaded (expression levels tables, gene sets...). Ideally also provide a way to not surround them but this should be harder to get to (default checkbox that's on that says 'Format for Excel')

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