Emplode export bug

I have been playing about tonight putting together some code for empeg database manipulation (which I hope will become useful once the protocol code is released). I am using a CSV file exported from Emplode, but there are some problems with it.

The problem is that many of the playlists only have a three or four valid FIDs listed in the contents field, the rest of the entries are all '000'

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Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

playlists only have a three or four valid FIDs listed in the contents field, the rest of the entries are all '000'

You're probably importing Emplode's export into Excel.
When during the import you accept the 'general' settings that Excel suggests as format for the columns, the pointers in the 'content' column are interpreted as a very large number, which is approximated as a value with only 14 decimal places raised it to a power of 10. Thus the the least significant numbers will be set to zero, and you get only three or four valid FIDs in the contents field.

To prevent this from happening (and see the real contents) you should not accept Excel's suggestion to format the data as 'general', but request 'text' formatting during the import. This will make Excel to display the contents properly. Example:

content of a playlist with format set to text: 122,123,124,125,126,215,216,217,218,219,220

Same entry, in 'general' format is: 1.22123124125126E+32, which gets displayed as 122,123,124,125,126 filled up '000's to get 10 power 32.
With thousand's indicator set to comma, the display format in Excel suggests that only the entries up to 126 are there. The remaining ones are rounded to '000'

The data exported by Emplode's is OK though.

Henno
# 00120