Read charts from .csv files (or other spreadsheet files?)

[Terri Oda]

Currently, we have a (somewhat simplistic) parser for written instructions that generates charts, but we'd like to be able to also generate written instructions from charts. One step for this would be reading charts out of spreadsheets or other formats. I'm not actually entirely sure how this would work, as a typical chart includes colours and stuff that wouldn't necessarily be seen in a .csv export. But let's start with the easiest part of the problem and see if we can at least read symbols from a .csv file and get them into some sort of Chart data structure for further manipulation.

[Anna Baas]

This seems to be right up my alley! Couple of questions:

1. I've never seen a knitting chart in .csv 😬 Is there an example of this? (Asking because I'd guess it be most useful to make something people can use with their existing charts, with maybe some search/replace to fit the pyknit .csv format we'd define)
2. Wouldn't it be fun to parse the pyknit generated charts, partly because then you could edit a generated chart and parse it back into instructions?

[Terri Oda]

1. .csv is just a common output format from spreadsheets. (So it would be an easy way to get partway there.) I'm definitely up for starting somewhere more useful if there's good charting formats out there!
2. Yes! They're not working well enough for it to be useful yet but that would definitely be great.