[LON-CAPA-admin] scantron format

[James Mueller]

With our university moving to ParScore for scantron processing, I now  
have to deal with the new format.  They had said it would be in csv  
format, but I just got one back and it is excel.  I can open it in  
excel and save as csv, but I don't see how to add it to the equivalent  
of scantronformat.tab, since that assumes a fixed column location for  
the start of various fields.

Below are a few example lines from a csv generated from a returned  
excel file.  The format is
ID,LastName,FirstName,MiddleInitial,,responses

3404816 
,STUDENT 
,EVAN 
,,,A 
,A 
,B 
,A 
,D 
,C 
,D 
,A 
,C 
,D 
,C 
,A 
,B 
,D 
,B 
,B,C,B,C,A,D,B,A,D,D,C,D,D,B,B,A,A,A,A,D,C,A,C,C,C,B,C,B,C,A,B,B,C,D,C,B
3334401 
,ALONGNAME 
,NICOLE 
,,,B 
,A 
,D 
,D 
,A 
,D 
,B 
,C 
,C 
,A 
,A 
,C 
,C 
,D 
,A 
,C,A,B,B,B,B,A,C,D,C,B,A,D,D,C,D,D,B,C,B,C,C,A,A,C,C,A,D,C,D,A,A,A,D,C,D
3363920 
,SHORT 
,JOHN 
,R 
,,D 
,C 
,B 
,B 
,A 
,C 
,A 
,D 
,B 
,C 
,B 
,B 
,A 
,C 
,C 
,C,C,C,D,B,B,B,A,D,C,B,A,A,D,B,A,B,C,D,D,B,D,C,C,B,B,C,A,B,A,D,B,C,B,D,B

If I could write a script to convert this to our old format, or into  
something I could put into scantronformat.tab, but I think some of the  
other faculty might have trouble with that.
1) get the excel file from the office of measurement.
2) save it as a csv file
3) run this perl/python/whatever script on it.
	3a. make sure you have perl/python/whatever, on your system
4) upload the output file to loncapa.

Is there a way to enter a line in scantronformat.tab so that it can  
cope with variable length fields?  Or is there an easier way to deal  
with this.

-Jim