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The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
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Gradebook CSV import treats escaped commas as field separators. #1394

Open eritain opened 5 years ago

eritain commented 5 years ago

Summary:

CSV ("comma-separated values") can and does represent values that contain commas. It uses ASCII double quotation marks around the value to indicate that the comma is part of the value, not a field separator. For example, a number may be formatted "1,234.56"

Gradebook import ignores the quotation marks, which spreads the value across multiple fields that it's not supposed to be in.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Put a score over 999 in Gradebook, or several scores such that a total exceeds 999. On another row, keep all numbers below 999.
  2. Export CSV.
  3. Re-import CSV.

Expected behavior:

Grades are unchanged.

Actual behavior:

Values exceeding 999 are incorrectly spread across multiple cells. All subsequent values on the same row land in the wrong column.

Additional notes:

Gradebook version history is good, but a rollback function would be better. Much, much better.

There are widely used, tested, freely available libraries that parse CSV correctly.

Fuzz testing would probably have caught this bug.

stale[bot] commented 3 years ago

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