The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

A few of my users here have asked about a way to dump their lists’ subscribers into an Excel-compatible format.

 

I’ve shown them the ‘dump’ button, but this is apparently no use because it only lists the email addresses, and not the Full Name or any custom list subscriber attributes.  There seems to be an undocumented extension to ‘dump’ that gives inconsistent behaviour – a normal ‘dump’ is actually dump/$listname/light which only outputs the subscriber email, whereas doing a dump after a search does dump/$listname/$searchregexp which will output email addres AND full name, separated by a tab.

 

I think that ‘dump’ should output all of these items on a line, but what format would be best? 

-          Space separated would not work as the third field (after the Full Name) could not be properly identified.  Also, this cannot be directly loaded into a spreadsheet.

-          Tab separated can be loaded into a spreadsheet but requires a little work to do so

-          Comma separated might not work if the custom fields hold commas.  Also, this would mean that the dumped output could not subsequently be loaded into the “Multiple Add” page, which expects it to match /^\s*($email_regexp)(\s+(.*))?\s*$/

-          Comma separated, with quotes around name and custom fields, would work for spreadsheets, but has the same problem with Multiple Add

 

I would suggest that firstly, the multiple add command (do_add() in wwsympa.cgi) change the regexp to instead match /^\s*($email_regexp)(\s*[, ]?\s*([^,]*))?\s*$/ so that we can at least use comma-separated for multiple import.

 

Secondly, there could be a ‘heavy’ dump type, accessed by dump/$listname/heavy, that does a CSV dump including any list parameters.

 

Thirdly, there is an increasing risk of the format parameter to do_dump colliding with a true regexp.  In this case, maybe a regexp should be given as  dump/$listname/{light or heavy}/$searchregexp instead?  However this might cause some backwards compatibility issues and would require a change to search.tt2 and review.tt2 to make them use a different URL for dump.

 

Then change search.tt2 and review.tt2 to have multiple ‘Dump’ options, depending on if you want light or heavy.

 

It seems that, at the moment, the ‘dump’ command is inconsistent in that it works differently before and after a search, and it does not support custom subscriber parameters.   What do people think about this as a solution?  I’m thinking of submitting a patch to achieve this one way or another.

 

Steve

 

Steve Shipway

University of Auckland

UNIX Systems Design Team Lead

address@concealed

+64 (9) 3737 599 ext 86487

 

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