@jverd said:
@Sutherlands said:Blakey I'm curious - what does Notepad display? (Or VS, if you have access)
edit: For the record, I created a text file with various encodings, and then opened the file in notepad. With notepad UTF-32 had spaces between the characters, but in Visual Studio it just worked. I imagine this is what blakey expects. Most things that deal with text files these days seem to have auto-detection for the file encoding.
It's a messy area. Between file encodings, which characters are actually used in a given file, what the system default encoding is, how the tool picks its default encoding, whether it tries to automatically figure out the encoding (which, as previously stated is often (usually?) not possible) or tries to at least figure out some encoding that can work (probably much simpler), it's hard to predict what to expect for a given file with a given tool. And of course, if one hasn't taken the time to understand the issues that are involved and learn what's in play in one's environment and how one's tool (snerk!) is designed to handle said context, one might very well end up in a self-righteous snit, providing merriment for all.
He's pedantically expecting perfection, or he acts like he is.
Yesterday I had a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 that wouldn't print with gridlines, despite the fact that "Print" was checked under the Sheet option for Guidelines. I also checked the gridline color and found it to be black (or something that should print). Print Preview showed it with gridlines. But when it came out, it didn't have lines on it. This was a form that our telecom department needed to write on, so it needed to have the lines.
I was tempted to come here and spew a parody BlakeyRant® about how badly Excel sucks, how can Microsoft put out such shit software, that it ought to just work, etc. But instead, I just did what I needed to do -- explicitly bordered everything that I needed to border and reprinted. Lo and behold, it worked. At some point, I may try to troubleshoot it. Or I may not. It might be a print driver issue. Or it might not. But whatever. Personally, I wish I could type "comparison.csv" (just a random .CSV file on my H: drive right now) on the command line and have Excel interpret it as a CSV file. It opens it, but it doesn't interpret it. You still have to open a new spreadsheet, do the Data -> Get External Data From Text in order to have it process that.
But I'm not getting hypertensive and risking a stroke over it.