Forum Discussion

Iwanicki's avatar
Iwanicki
Frequent Visitor
4 years ago
Solved

Locale settings should not affect CSV import

My team and I spent a lot of time figuring out why the decimal numbers imported from a CSV file are incorrect - the delimiter was gone and the values were "multiplied" by 100. First, we thought there...
General Comment
  • AlexisOlson's avatar
    AlexisOlson
    4 years ago
    The output of the M code should not be affected by application's settings.

    I disagree. The application settings govern how the input is interpreted. Under different interpretations, identical data means different things and the output should reflect proper meaning. Since a CSV file doesn't contain reliable locale metadata, there isn't a straightforward way for Power Query to magically know what interpretation you expect it to use unless you specify it in the code or in the application settings.

ronrsnfld's avatar
ronrsnfld
Super User
4 years ago

As far as I know, the CSV file does not include locale information.  And I'm not sure how PQ would be able to infer that from CSV contents.  However, you can tell PQ the locale of the incoming csv file in the third argument of the "Table.TransformColumnDataTypes" function.  With that information, it can do the proper transformations.