MyWiki:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 April 27

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April 27

MS-Excel

What is MS-Excel? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aadya mishra (talk • contribs) 05:14, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

It means Microsoft Excel. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:37, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

iPhone Camcorder/iMovie

Why cannot i import camcorder films from my iPhone into iMovie please?--85.211.154.241 (talk) 05:56, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Do any of these links help?[1][2][3] If not, it would be useful if you told us the particular problem you are having and the version of iMovie and other software you are using. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:04, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

iPhone3 and iMovie 11.--85.211.154.241 (talk) 15:12, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, forgot to thank you for the links, I think that the first one will be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.211.154.241 (talk) 15:18, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Leading spaces are stripped out of Access table

I am using Access 2007 and importing data from a .csv file into text fields in a table. Some of the text fields have leading spaces which are needed and I want to keep them but Access strips them all out when the data is imported. How can I stop this happening please? Gurumaister (talk) 07:39, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Can you put quotation marks around the individual data items, including the leading spaces? Comma-separated values suggests this. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:10, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I can't. The .csv is an export of a name and address file from another (non-Access) database so the data comes out without quotation marks. Surely having leading spaces stripped out should be a matter of choice and therefore optional? I am finding it very frustrating. Gurumaister (talk) 13:22, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Access handles all unquoted spaces before data as just ignorable whitespace and ignores it. I don't see any way around that with Access's interface. Your options, as I see them, are 1. Have the other database spit out the data in a quoted fashion, or 2. Put together some kind of CSV pre-processor that adds the quotes in for you automatically. (The latter is only a moderately difficult scripting task, as far as scripting tasks go.) --Mr.98 (talk) 14:27, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

This Python script does that (blindly - even elements without whitespace get quoted anyway). It reads stdin and write stdout. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:55, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

#!/usr/bin/python
import csv,sys
for r in csv.reader(sys.stdin):
    for i in range(0,len(r)):
        r[i] = '"%s"'%r[i]
    print ','.join(r)

Can you get an intermediate file between database 1 and 2 (this is in line with what 98 talks about as a pre-processor)? Shadowjams (talk) 16:02, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Can you predict which fields should have leading white-space? If so you can write an update query in Access that re-adds the whitespaces back in as part of either the import routine or a separate query post import of data. ny156uk (talk) 13:52, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Presumably the amount of whitespace varies in an unpredictable way, otherwise it would be a simple workaround to just tack on some whitespace. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:41, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Python exception fail

File:Yes check.svg Resolved

Why isn't this exception caught?

try:
    j = "rgb".index(instring.pop(0))
    ...
except ValueError,IndexError:
    ...

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "mug1.py", line 36, in <module>
   j = "rgb".index(instring.pop(0))
IndexError: pop from empty list

I tried unpacking the expression:

    ch = instring.pop(0)
    j = "rgb".index(ch)

but that didn't help. —Tamfang (talk) 19:37, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

You need parens around ValueError,IndexError to make it a tuple. As it is you're catching ValueError into an object called IndexError. --Sean 19:48, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I see. That's a feature I haven't used much. Thanks! —Tamfang (talk) 00:06, 28 April 2012 (UTC)