joplin-plugin-csv-import

Joplin CSV Import Plugin

This plugin serves the insertion of a md table from CSV text from either the clipboard or a CSV file. This plug-in can be used in either of 2 ways:

• You can import a CSV file by using the import command for CSV files: Invoke File - Import - CSV File and select the CSV file
• You can insert the content of the Clipboard interpreting it as CSV text by using the appropriate command Paste CSV: Copy the contents to the clipboard (from Excel for instance) and invoke the command Edit - Paste CSV

In either case the plug-in tries to interprete the text as CSV and builds a table from it. It uses a simple algorithm to determine the used delimiter. This self-recognition enables the use of 3 different delimiter characters (see: CSV File Format)

CSV File Format

The items in a file line are separated by either of 3 delimiter characters:

• a comma ','
• a semi-colon ';'
• or a tabulator '\t';

The lines themselves are separated by an optional CARIAGE RETURN and a NEWLINE as usual.

The items in a line may be enclosed by Double Quotes enabling them to contain the separator character and escaped quotes.

The first line of the file / text is a header line with item names.

The file / text encoding is assumed to be UTF-8.

Tests

The plugin was tested with an Excel - exported csv file and with a sheet copied from Excel to the clipboard.

Algorithm

Although the functionality is relatively simple, the program uses an ANTLR tool for grammatical analysis. In a first run it determines the most common delimiter. In the second run the grammar is analyzed based on this delimiter and the pieces of information are extracted (header, rows, fields) and transformed. I believe this way the program is kept from being too complicated.