Search CSV Download Adding Extra Single Quote to Number Values

Identity Security Cloud (ISC) ISC Discussion and Questions
1

Has anyone seen this behavior? We have phone numbers in E164 format and when I download the CSV from the Search UI, there are single quotes prepended, but the value in SailPoint does not have them.

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Plain Text
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Excel
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Postman /v3/search for that user
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2

I’m seeing the same behavior. I believe it is applying the single quote in order to escape the + sign under the assumption that you’ll be opening the sheet in Excel. I opened one in Notepad++ and removed a few of the single quotes, then opened it in Excel and the plus signs were stripped. I don’t know if this is a csv standard or something done specifically for Excel.

2 Likes
3

I agree with @KevinHarrington though I have not seen any official information like you will see the quotes. But as a developer, I will be handling this appending quotes or handling data with special characters so that it will not break in CSV or Excel files like mobile with + or display name which might have comma ( , ) where as your delimiter is comma ( , ) so it might consider it as extra column.

Personally, I feel happy that SailPoint developers handled it very well while downloading reports.

4

I am seeing the same behavior. The CSV standard does not require the quote so it appears to be an exception made for users that directly open the file in Excel.

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I would recommend Importing the CSV into Excel, rather than opening directly, so that you can set these columns as text rather than general. This goes for other number and boolean columns that can be unintentionally converted.

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5

I’ve seen this also and think it’s a hack to be honest and would prefer they got treated as a text string with double quotes around the whole thing vs.a single single quote prepended. The double quotes are always used in CSV when the text value has, or potentially has, a comma or other character that could break the format.

The single quote prepended is purely Excel related as far as I’m aware so while most/many will likely use Excel it’s a pain if you’re not.

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