Extra whitespace sneaking in csv export?

[icweaver]

Howdy again, I just wanted to start by saying how much I LOVE this feature. It has been a huge time saver over scraping data from other services 🙌🏾

While working with a recent export, I noticed that some trailing whitespace seems to be present, and I was not sure if this was intended. In both the Dates <> people available and Name <> dates available formats, the extra character of whitespace looks to be added to the end of each name. Here's some sample output below showing this behavior:

Test_dates_people.csv preview

Date / Time,FirstName_A LastName_A ,FirstName_C MiddleName_C LastName_C ,FirstNameOnly_B- <-- trailing whitespace
"10/23/2024, 9:00:00 AM",Available,Available,Available
"10/23/2024, 9:15:00 AM",Available,Available,Available

Test_dates_people.csv

Test_name_dates.csv preview

Name,Date / Times available
FirstName_A LastName_A ,"10/23/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"10/24/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"10/25/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"10/26/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
FirstName_C MiddleName_C LastName_C ,"10/23/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/23/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/23/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"10/24/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/24/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/24/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,"10/24/2024, 12:30:00 PM","10/24/2024, 12:45:00 PM","10/24/2024, 1:00:00 PM","10/24/2024, 1:15:00 PM","10/24/2024, 1:30:00 PM","10/24/2024, 1:45:00 PM","10/24/2024, 2:00:00 PM","10/24/2024, 2:15:00 PM","10/24/2024, 2:30:00 PM","10/24/2024, 2:45:00 PM",,,,,,,,,"10/25/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/25/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/25/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,"10/25/2024, 12:30:00 PM","10/25/2024, 12:45:00 PM","10/25/2024, 1:00:00 PM","10/25/2024, 1:15:00 PM","10/25/2024, 1:30:00 PM","10/25/2024, 1:45:00 PM","10/25/2024, 2:00:00 PM","10/25/2024, 2:15:00 PM","10/25/2024, 2:30:00 PM","10/25/2024, 2:45:00 PM",,,,,,,,,"10/26/2024, 9:00:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:15:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:30:00 AM","10/26/2024, 9:45:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:00:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:15:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:30:00 AM","10/26/2024, 10:45:00 AM",,,,,,,"10/26/2024, 12:30:00 PM","10/26/2024, 12:45:00 PM","10/26/2024, 1:00:00 PM","10/26/2024, 1:15:00 PM","10/26/2024, 1:30:00 PM","10/26/2024, 1:45:00 PM","10/26/2024, 2:00:00 PM","10/26/2024, 2:15:00 PM","10/26/2024, 2:30:00 PM","10/26/2024, 2:45:00 PM",,,,,,,,

Test_name_dates.csv

Anyway, it's not a big deal for me to just handle this in post-processing, and it only seems to affect name data, but I wanted to bring it up here in case there is a reasonable fix. Apologies if this is an intended feature that I am using incorrectly!

[jonyTF]

Hi yes this is intended because one of our users thought it was better to visualize the data this way.... do you prefer it to not have whitespace at all?

[icweaver]

Right, no whitespace would be my preference. I usually just use CSVs as part of a pipeline instead of viewing the raw file directly, so visual aesthetics aren't really so much of a concern for me as having uniform formatting is

Currently, handling column names looks something like the following pseudo-code:

df = read("Test_dates_people.csv")

# No trailing space
df["Date / Time"]

# Different handling required
df["FirstName_A LastName_A "]

and requires special casing on respondents' names to be used later in the pipeline. Totally not a big deal, I can always normalize the column names beforehand or rstrip things, but not needing to do these steps is something that I think would be nice if possible