I agree with you. It's much better practice to fix the original data (or the
dump of the original data).
But I think I would have a conversation that you'd like to be notified before
any changes go online. (Maybe they'll abbreviate a header and change your
columns again???)

Dallman Ross wrote:

In , Dave Peterson
spake thusly:

You may want to speak with them and tell them not to fix it. If
they notice it, then they might think that it's a problem that
should be corrected and then you'll be distressed again.

I appreciate what you're saying, Dave -- but I think they
should fix it. I think it's bad practice to insert leading
spaces in CSV files, and will only lead to devlish trouble.
I also think the database guy who approved that should be
reprimanded.

My TRIM won't hurt if they change it back. I only need it
in the security-name column. The other leading blanks
turn out not to be a major problem now. The dates are
working okay too, as 2-digit years, since I reset my
query and explicitly stated those date columns are dates.
So if they change that back too, I'm still okay.

I'm struggling with more problems their changes have introduced
in my macro results, though. I'll go to bed now (it's 3 a.m.
where I am, which is Germany). I'll have to tweak more
tomorrow. I really had something else in mind to do for
this weekend. :-(

Dallman

=======================
Dallman Ross wrote:

In , Dallman Ross
<dman@localhost. spake thusly:

Oh, brother; I see. The jerks inserted a blank space in
front now in all the columns in the CSV file. I'm not sure
yet what the best way to handle this is -- I'm not wanting to
massage the data I download and import.

It's taking a bit of work, but now I've mostly fixed things via
a new data query and the TRIM function. I still think it was
stupid of the broker's people to suddenly insert leading spaces
inside CSV fields. This is right out of the file by way of
example [both lines below are in the file at the top]:

Description,Quantity,Date Acquired,Purchase Price,...
" ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES INC"," 90.0000"," 6/08/06"," 27.42",...

Dallman

--

Dave Peterson