CSV and TSV Text Formats

Mental Case allows you to import and export text and media files in Comma-Separated Values (CSV) and Tab-Separated Values (TSV) formats. These formats are widely supported by many applications, and give you a means of transferring your mental notes to and from Mental Case.

The CSV format is quite simple: Each line in a CSV file contains the text content of each facet, separated by commas. When exporting, you can choose to include plain text, or HTML formatted text.

Sometimes you need to include a comma in your text. To indicate that a comma belongs in the note text, and is not the ‘separating’ comma, you should enclose the text in quotation marks. If you would like to include a quotation mark in your note text, use two quotation marks instead: Mental Case will replace the double quotation marks with a single quotation mark.

The same applies to a carriage return as to commas: if you want to include them in the text of a facet, add quotation marks around the text in question.

Here is an example of some CSV text:

This is a question, And this is the answer
This note has has one facet
“How do you include a comma (,) in your text?”, Use quotation marks
“What if you want to have a quotation (””) mark?”, “Enter ”” to get a quotation mark.”
“This is line 1 of a facet
This is line 2 of the same facet”

You can also import media files using CSV and TSV format. The media files should either be in the same directory as the CSV/TSV file you are importing, or a complete path must be given from the CSV/TSV file to the media file.

Mental Case will attempt to guess the distribution of content over facets; it creates a new facet whenever content no longer fits on the existing facet. If you are careful about the order of columns, you can distribute content across notes in many different ways, but if you need more control, you should consider using Study Archive, which is an advanced form of CSV/TSV.

Here is an example of a CSV file with media:

Does this line have images?, No
Photo 2.jpg
Does the line above include an image?, “Yes, this one”, Photo 2.jpg
What does a thoroughbred look like?, A Horse, Horse.png,
Who painted this?, MonaLisa.png, Da Vinci, MonaLisa.png,
This prompt facet has no image, This response does have an image, Desktop/Photo.png
This facet has an image and audio, Audio 1.wav, Photo 2.jpg

Tab-Separated Values (TSV) format is the same as CSV format, but tab characters are used to separate columns instead of commas.

CSV and TSV Text Formats

See also