netbox-community
CSV export delimiter setting
NetBox version
v4.0.11
Feature type
Change to existing functionality
Proposed functionality
There should be a global or user setting that defines the CSV delimiter used by the "Export CSV" function.
Use case
Currently the CSV export is comma separated (as it should be!) but on every German Windows installation the default delimiter is the semicolon ";". so it would be helpful to have a setting to change the default separator of csv exports.
Database changes
No response
External dependencies
No response
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Hi everyone,
Thanks for the suggestion!
I've looked into the feasibility of supporting a customizable CSV delimiter. While the idea makes a lot of sense - especially for locales where ; is the standard delimiter - it turns out that implementing this in the current NetBox setup isn't straightforward.
NetBox uses the django_tables2.TableExport class to handle CSV exports. Unfortunately, this class doesn’t currently support configurable delimiters. Enabling this feature would require overriding and maintaining a custom export method within the NetBox codebase.
For more context, here's a related discussion on the upstream issue: #899 Cannot set delimiter on CSV export
And here’s the relevant part of the NetBox code: https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/blob/ecb86567233e1ac4d4379590fdc7b6b45315767a/netbox/netbox/views/generic/bulk_views.py#L95-L99
Whether or not to take on this additional maintenance burden is ultimately up to the maintainers. That said, if support for configurable delimiters is added upstream in django-tables2, it would definitely simplify things and make this feature more viable in the future.
Thanks again for the thoughtful suggestion!
