Edge case: elective subjects

[ArchibaldBienetre]

Not all students take all subjects.

We need to find a way

• how to represent this in the CSV data
• consider this when validating the CSV file for correctness

[ArchibaldBienetre]

I did some thinking.

• the end user will mainly work with Excel, or LibreOffice Calc
• in the "middle" of the file, empty cells should not be a problem, as they will not trip up validation
  • but we should do some testing, nevertheless!
• this only becomes an issue if elective subjects occur at the end of a row

We could implement logic that listens for certain keywords to mark a subject as elective:

• elective
• elektiv
• optional subject
• Wahlpflicht
• the above, in parentheses

Examples:

• "Advanced Chemistry (elective)\n[...]"
• "Modern Phisics (optional subject)\n[...]"
• "Wahlpflicht: Informatik\n[...]"

Then we could

• strip away the marker keywords or ignore them (implementation-defined)
• feed the information to the validator so it does not report a false positive

[ArchibaldBienetre]

If I save a CSV with missing content rows in Libre Office calc, it will fill in the missing content cells as empty strings, like so:

a,b,c,d
1,,,
1,2,,
1,2,3,
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,
1,2,,
1,,,

So, as long as we can deal with empty Strings, we should actually be fine, there should be no danger here.

[ArchibaldBienetre]

(best typo ever :D https://github.com/SergelsOrg/csv2tex/issues/36#event-6053396369 )