sc: the Venerable Spreadsheet Calculator

To save a file, press P followed by a filename, such as budget.sc. To save a plain-text representation, press W followed by a filename, such as budget.asc. I find these particularly useful, not only to paste into an e-mail quickly, but also to look through a set of spreadsheets easily.

You also can output other formats. For instance, to output a LaTeX table to paste into a paper, type S (for set) tblstyle=latex, followed by T (for table output) output.tex. The resulting LaTeX table, of course, also lends itself to unending options for pretty-fication by adding images, fonts, colors and whatnot. For me, plain text almost always is the most useful.

To exchange data with other spreadsheet programs, sc exports in a colon-delimited format. Unfortunately, this exports the results of formulas and not the formulas themselves, but it still can be useful.

You can output colon-separated files in sc by typing S (for set) tblstyle=0, followed by T (for table output) output.cln. Actually, 0 is the default tblstyle, so you need to do only the first step (S), if you selected another format previously (like LaTeX).

To import this in OpenOffice.org's OOCalc, open OOCalc, go to the Insert menu, and choose Select from file. Browse to your output.cln file and select it. You'll get an import screen with a Separator options section. For Separated by, choose Other, and type in a colon. Make sure all other Separated by options are deselected, or it won't work right.

Unfortunately, although sc can export other formats, it does not import them. However, you can work around that. One way is to start by getting CSV output. This should be an option for your on-line bank statement, for instance. From OOCalc, choose Save as→Text CSV format, and click Edit filter setting. If the next pop-up warns you about losing information in this format, click keep current format. In the field options pop-up, unselect Save cell contents as shown; otherwise, numeric values will be placed in quotes. For field delimiter, let's use :, as that's what sc outputs. Let's assume that import.csv is the name of the resulting file.

There probably are several ways to import this data into sc. For instance, sc offers advanced macros you might be able to use. However, I think the simplest way is to convert the CSV file into a valid sc format file. This is easy, because the sc format itself is simple, plain-text—another reason for my fondness of sc.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import string

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "Usage: %s infile [outfile] [delimiter_char]" % sys.argv[0]
    sys.exit(1)

filename_in = sys.argv[1]

if len(sys.argv) > 2:
    filename_out = sys.argv[2]
    outfile = open(filename_out, 'w')
else:
    outfile = sys.stdout

delimiter = ':'
if len(sys.argv) == 4:
    delimiter = sys.argv[3][0]
    print 'using delimiter %c' % delimiter

infile = open(filename_in, 'r')

letters = string.ascii_uppercase
text = ["# Produced by convert_csv_to_sc.py" ]
row=0
for line in infile.readlines():
    allp = line.rstrip().split(delimiter)
    if len(allp) > 25:
        print "i'm too simple to handle more than 26 many columns"
        sys.exit(2)
    column = 0
    for p in allp:
        col = letters[column]
        if len(p) == 0:
                continue
        try:
            n = string.atol(p)
            text.append('let %c%d = %d' % (col, row, n))
        except:
            if p[0] == '"':
                text.append('label %c%d = %s' % (col, row, p))
            else:
                text.append('label %c%d = "%s"' % (col, row, p))
        column += 1
    row += 1

infile.close()
outfile.write("\n".join(text))
outfile.write("\n")
if outfile != sys.stdout:
    outfile.close()

The Python script in Listing 2 simply walks over the CSV values one by one, writing out sc commands to insert text and numeric values. Note how easy it also would be to insert formulas, if CSV supported them. Run this script by typing:

python c.py import.csv import.sc

If your CSV file was separated by a character other than a colon, for instance, a comma, add the delimiter as the last option:

python c.py import.csv import.sc ','

Now, open the spreadsheet with:

sc import.sc

Voilà, your on-line bank statement or simple OpenOffice.org spreadsheet is now open in sc.

You can take this one step further and turn c.py into an automatic plugin. Be warned, however, that this support isn't perfect. To do so, place a copy into .sc/plugins/. Then, add a line to $HOME/.scrc that reads:

plugin "cln" = "c.py"

Now, any time you open a file in scn with a .cln extension using G (for get), it will be filtered through c.py, and sc will take its input from the plugin's standard output. Unfortunately, this support apparently was rarely used and is not well implemented. Specifying a .cln file on the command line (sc r.cln) will not invoke the plugin, so you must start sc with no files, and use the G command to load the file. Also, if you save the file later, it will use r.cln as the default filename but save an sc format file. So, if you use a plugin format, you'll need to specify a corresponding plugout script (let's call it cout.py) as well, and add a line to $HOME/.scrc that reads:

plugout "cln" = "cout.py"