Just my two cents worth here: you definitely do not want to try to embed newlines within the interiors of fields in a CSV file.
Different programs parse CSV differently, but almost all of them treat the newline as an end-of-record terminator. That is, each line is a single record (regardless of using any quotiing or not).
I realize this next statement is “painting with an overly wide brush”, but in general, CSV is an “okay but not great” data format for simple data interchange between systems, but NOT good for human-readable formatted data. Are you writing the formatted output as something like an XLSX file? You mentioned “flat file” several times, and Excel is not “flat” so I’m not sure here.
(BTW, by “okay but not great” I mean that are better formats for data interchange too, but often CSV is “all you’ve got” and you make do.)
Hey @ForbinCSD,
Thank you for your time, comments and sharing your perspective on this. I edited by post and replaced “flat file” with an “excel file”.
I agree that CSV is not good for human-readable formatted data but I wanted to understand whether line breaks were even achievable via an excel (preferred solution) or worst-case scenario (a CSV i.e. flat file)
The reason I edited my post is that, I agreed that using flat and excel would have created a confusion and I wanted to double down on excel approach. Frankly, even if line breaks are not achievable, it would be fine; I just have to compromise on the readability part, at the end of the day, I can still use an “email-sender” snap and define my template accordingly on top of generating an excel file (as a backup)
Having said that, if Line breaks can be introduced, that is something I would learn from this thread as I’m not sure how to do that without any manual intervention after the file has been generated.
Thank you.
