Description David Alves 2008-07-07 13:57:23 EDT

Created attachment 106738 [details]
A TSV that BIRT can't import

Build ID: I20080617-2000

Steps To Reproduce:
1. Create a report that uses the attached file as a flat file .tsv data source
2. BIRT will complain about invalid flat file format and will not import data.

More information:
BIRT doesn't like double quotes in the middle of a text field in a TSV file.
I tried escaping the double quotes many different ways before I finally figured out that a field which has quotes needs to escaped like this:
String escapedField = "\"" + rawField.replace("\"","\"") + "\"";

I think the parsing behavior should be documented in the BIRT documentation, since it is different from other definitions of the TSV format. For example, the MIME type text/tab-separated-values has no special characters other than tab. (http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separated-values) Excel 2003 also treats the quotes as expected.

I think either BIRT should ignore all non-tab characters in fields, or the rules it uses to parse .tsv files should be in the documentation somewhere.