[Gretl-users] 'store' issues

[Allin Cottrell]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Well if 'store' is expert-ish, then it needs some expert 
> information ;-) Anyway, I would prefer if 'store' simply uses 
> the gretl preference setting of the user directory. At least 
> that is what I expected first.

OK, I agree that's not an unreasonable expectation.  I'll modify 
"store" to do that, but leave the option of using a leading dot to 
mean "save in the PWD", as in

store ./foo.csv --csv

>>> All this makes parsing gretl's csv files error-prone IMHO. I 
>>> propose to do one of the following two things: Either enclose 
>>> _all_ strings in double quotes, and have the 
>>> enclosed-but-leading single quote for all date values; (X)OR 
>>> remove _all_ quotes, and change the separator ':' to 'M', 'W', 
>>> 'D' according to the data frequency, in analogy to the 'Q' for 
>>> quarterly data. What do you think?

I'm inclined to remove all quotes, since none of the fields will 
have embedded commas, or embedded spaces.

What do you think of the idea, for quarterly and monthly data, of 
putting in the "date" or "obs" field the date which opens the 
period, in YYYY-MM-DD notation (or YYYY/MM/DD??).  This would mean 
that a spreadsheet program ought to be able to get the time-series 
information right.  For annual we'd just print the year.

> Btw, the background for all this is that I want to manage data 
> in gretl and then pass them to specialized python programs...

Ah, I'm all in favour of computer-friendliness!  I'll try to 
cooperate.

Allin.