Multi-line notes concatenate into one line in CSV export

[jmsgwd]

The CSV export concatenates multi-line notes fields into one line by replacing CR (13) and LF (10) characters with a comma. This makes the notes fields unreadable in the CSV export.

Furthermore, you cannot undo the damage using search and replace, because commas appear frequently in normal text.

The CSV format is capable of handling multi-line values. They just need to be enclosed in double quotes as I understand. Furthermore, Excel will import them successfully, and display them as a multi-line cell. This is the desired behaviour, in my view.

Years ago, there was a Things 2 export AppleScript floating around, which isn't really usable now for several reasons - but one thing it did get right is that it preserved multi-line notes in CSV correctly. And these were handled by Excel without issue - each multi-line notes field appeared in a single cell in Excel containing the notes text with line breaks.

In my opinion, the CSV export should follow the principle of least surprise. It should preserve users' data wherever possible, without mangling or corrupting it. That includes preserving line breaks in the notes fields.