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Comment by karolisd | Hacker News Reader

Just today I had a couple issues with Excel if I wanted to save something as JSON or if I wanted to save something as an UTF-8 encoded CSV (Excel converts it to ASCII).

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I've come across several data format conversion issues, in my personal use cases and of others. Would a reliable format conversion app be of value on its own?

My company uses the French version of MS Office and after upgrading, I can't quite get it to generate CSV files in the right encoding needed to work with the company's proprietary software. So I need to go through the hassle of manually generating the CSV files in the correct format. An easy way to work with different encodings and formats will be especially useful for collaboration.

One thing that would be simple and useful is the ability to generate or convert between different CSV file formats. For example, French CSV files use semicolons instead of commas to separate values, and use commas as decimal points.

Thanks for your comment, Jongseong. I'd like to learn a bit more about your file conversion issues. Can I email you somewhere?

Yeah, probably. A closely related problem is cleaning up data. Something that can detect unclosed quotes and/or unclosed HTML tags. Something that can figure out when a word should be capitalized or lowercase.

Here's another problem: how do you make a field in a CSV that when you convert the document into JSON, the field becomes an array?

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