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!

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.