Formats / CSV
CSV is what a translation agency sends back and what a product manager opens in Excel. It has no standard, so the work is in reading whatever arrived.
.csv
Linguiqo finds the key column under key, term, id, identifier or msgid, and the translation under translation, target, value, text or msgstr. A context column (context, msgctxt, description) and a comment column (comment, notes, note) are read when they are there.
A file without a header row is read as two columns, key and text, because that is the shape of the quick export everybody makes at least once.
Excel in much of Europe saves CSV with semicolons, and a semicolon file read as comma-separated arrives as one enormous column. The delimiter is detected from the file (comma, semicolon, tab or pipe), and the export uses the same one, so the file goes back to the person who sent it in the shape they sent it.
Excel opens a plain UTF-8 CSV as if it were Western European, and every č, ł and é turns into two garbled characters. The export starts with the byte-order mark that tells Excel it is UTF-8.
A cell that starts with =, +, - or @ is a formula to a spreadsheet, and it runs when the file is opened. Exported values that start that way are prefixed with an apostrophe, which every spreadsheet reads as "this is text", and the apostrophe is taken off again when the file comes back.
Four: key, context, translation and comment, with a header row, in the delimiter of the file you imported.
No. A CSV row holds one text per key, so plural strings belong in a format that has room for them, such as PO, i18next JSON or Android strings.xml.
Usually, yes. As long as one column is named like a key and one like a translation, the rest of the header can say anything.
The demo reads a real file of yours and shows what came back. No account, nothing kept.
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