[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #40993] xlsread doesn't fall back to csvread for .CSV files

[Philip Nienhuis]

Update of bug #40993 (project octave):

                Category:                    None => Octave Function        
                Severity:              3 - Normal => 1 - Wish               
                Priority:              5 - Normal => 1 - Later              
              Item Group:                    None => Matlab Compatibility   
                 Summary: xlsread to support loading CVS? => xlsread doesn't
fall back to csvread for .CSV files

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Follow-up Comment #1:

First off, if you want to read simple file formats like .csv, just use the
proper tools for it like csvread and/or dlmread. That's a lot faster anyway
than invoking overly "heavy" functions as xlsread.
Or even better, use csv2cell (also in the io package), it's also a lot faster
and it can even read heterogeneous .csv files (mixed text and numeric data).

If you run Octave on Windows with MS-Excel (or in any OS with Java &
LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org) installed, xlsread can read any file format that
is supported by Excel (LibreOffice / OOo, resp.), including .csv.

What Octave's xlsread doesn't do is fall back to csvread if no Excel (or
LO/OOo) was found, indeed. I've been very reluctant to mimic this sort of
Matlab code bloat in Octave's spreadsheet functions for various reasons.

BTW 1: I noted you do have the UNO interface supported (LibreOffice/OOo). It
should be possible to run xlsread like:

[num, txt, raw, lims] = xlsread (<filename.csv>, 1, "", "UNO")

(and it'll give you the desired overhead ;-) )
Please check if this works OK for you.

I think (but I'm unsure) that this should have happened automatically, but
failed because of this:

BTW 2: That POI interface message is a bug / red herring, please ignore. It
has been fixed in io-1.2.4 IIRC

---------------
As there are very suitable alternatives/workarounds I'll provisionally lower
priority/severity to "wish"; adapted title

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