Windows 8.1
Psychopy version 1.90.2
I’m testing my experiment (a self-paced reading task). After running the experiment, everytime I check the data file, I find results really messy and I can’t understand it.
The screenshot below is an example data spreadsheet.
Is there a configuration problem I should fix?
Is it a bug?
An answer would be very helpful.
Thank you.
It looks like you have your operating system set to use a French localisation. This likely regards a comma as a decimal point, which stops it being able to be interpreted as a separator between values.
It might be possible to specify that commas should be used to separate cells during your import wizard in Excel. Otherwise, try googling for how to change this setting at an Excel or operating system level.
From within Excel, you can fix this manually by selecting the first column and then click the “Text to columns” button on the “Data” ribbon (or under the Data menu on a Mac), and specify that the delimiter is a comma.
It also looks like Excel is ignoring the UTF-8 Unicode text encoding of your file, leading to gibberish in non-ASCII characters. Try something like this to fix: https://www.itg.ias.edu/content/how-import-csv-file-uses-utf-8-character-encoding-0
Problem solved! Thank you so much!
Just a note: The gibberish in the spreadsheet is Arabic characters that Psychopy cannot read.
Yes, I guessed that from the name of the file 
Note that it isn’t that PsychoPy can’t read the Arabic characters: it is correctly outputting them, but Excel is not defaulting to use the correct text decoding when it imports the data.
It is frustrating that Excel can be so poor at opening CSV files (at least from the Unicode text reading point of view, most software should really default to UTF-8 decoding. Perhaps PsychoPy could be better at quoting cell content to get around the comma delimiter issues).
Ah so it’s Excel’s problem! Because in order to be able to use Arabic sentences in Psychopy (which are imported from an Excel spreadsheet), I had to use Online Arabic Reshaper everytime and copy and paste the sentences word by word into every cell. 
Ah, yes, sorry I was just talking about reading the Arabic characters from the file. I’ve finally addressed the reshaping and right to left issues for actually displaying Arabic text (at least for single lines), but this is still only in the development version (i.e. this new feature will be in the next public release). Feedback would be very welcome:
Very interesting! This will make things much easier! 
Will be waiting for the next release and I will definitely test it!
