Importing
Yes, we ‘re having a little trouble with importing. But my wonderful husband is working on it, so I’m sure it will resolve itself eventually. Feel free to make suggestions!
Not much is going on here: I was in the National Gallery in London when I realized I couldn’t read the labels next to the paintings clearly, so off I went to have my eyes checked. Sure enough, my current glasses are several strengths too weak for my eyes. I’ve ordered two (!) new pairs and they should be ready on the 11th. Pictures will follow, of course.
In entertainment news, J & I have been watching 1940s House thanks to Netflix. It’s a BBC production – a ‘reality’ program where they took a modern British family and moved them into a home refurbished for life in 1940s. They live with wartime shortages, wartime clothing, wartime blackouts, a shelter and the occasional air raid siren. It was fascinating to see how housewives coped with all of the shortages. We particularly enjoyed this show as J’s late grandmother was a British war bride. She met J’s grandfather while he was in Britain after having been wounded in France. So for us, we were fascinated to see what life must have been like for her with ration coupons, enegry rations, womens voluntary service, etc. I have a whole new appreciation for how hard life must have been for the women on the home front.
July 2nd, 2006 at 3:24 am
If anyone knows why it is an Excel CSV file is only partially digested by MySQL please let me know. I would presume the escape values are the issue, but after a lot of experimentation I cannot pinpoint what exactly the escape value issue might be. Cheers
July 2nd, 2006 at 10:22 am
OK, well I gave up on the CSV file and went with PHP. If anyone ever needs a script to transfer data from MT tables to WP tables just say the word, I have one that works!!!!
July 2nd, 2006 at 3:47 pm
The new site looks great! Good job, Jason! Hope you’re enjoying it, Karen.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:21 am
Whew! For a minute there I thought it was 2001!
July 3rd, 2006 at 8:45 am
I’m very rusty at these kinds of things, but many of the underlying principles haven’t changed over the 38+ years since I’ve learned programming (almost all forgotten now).
When you are transferring info between unlike systems, programming languages, etc. to make things convenient there are agreed or defined deliminters to separate data items, like commas in the CSV files. To accomodate an imbedded comma within the data, it precedes it with an excape character, to tell the decoder that the following comma is to be treated as a comma in the data, and not as a delimiter. My guess would be that if you read the fine print in the instructions for the programs you’re using, you will discover that the escape character for the EXCEL CSV file is a control character for MySQL telling it that it’s reached end-of-file, or something else that you didn’t want to get. The escape character used to often be an @, but since it is used so frequently these days, it’s probably something else, maybe a 2 or 3 character sequence. For example, how do you suppose Excel creates a .CSV file with the contents of a cell to be something like: This is a ,,,, test ? Actually, it put ” around the entire cell contents.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:00 am
yes, I had a feeling it was something like that, I probably should have tried using some very “unused” characters instead…..perhaps tab delimited or something….
July 13th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
The MT import feature wouldn’t work? How odd. I did it years ago, so I don’t remember the details of my move. I know that the MT data dump used to be wonky if you used IE, so I wonder if that is still the case. Also, when using characters for a delimiter, I like the ~ or the ^ since they don’t normally appear in typed text. Those were the ones I used to use when I did data imports and exports back when I worked for a law firm.
Back to the real point of my comment though – I will have to add the 1940s House to my Netflix queue! I watched a similar show on PBS a few years ago – I think it was a BBC production also. It was about a house around the turn of the century and how the owners and the staff lived two separate lives. Really, really interesting. I bet the 1940s one was really cool! Especially since I have always been fascinated by WWII history. They had to chase me out of the War Rooms when I was in London – I spent too much time trying to read everything at the Churchhill Museum!